Copywriting

In order to successfully copyright a work you must first understand what copyrighting is. Copyrighting is establishing legal ownership of your work. It is used to protect your work from being copied by others and give you legal authority to "copy" or mass produce your work. However, not all uses of copyrighted material constitutes infringement. This means that though your tangible work is protected, your thoughts and ideas and facts are never proteceted by copyright. The Fair Use Docterine explains this further. Copyrighting is predominately used for written literary, dramatic, poetic, choreographic, architectural, cinematic and musical pieces and can be obtained for published or unpublished works. The 1976 Copyright Act discusses this further.

Securing copyright is not as difficult as you may think and although copyright is actually secured automatically when a work is created, it can be advantageous to officially register for legal purposes. So why bother?

The steps to obtaining copyright are fairly simple. First you must register to establish public record for your copyright claim by filling out the application form, Next, you must submit a filing fee and finally, you must send a copy of the work intended for copyright to the Library of Congress. Sounds pretty easy huh? So easy, in fact, that there are many websites set up to walk you right through it!

For additional information or a complete list of copyrighted work please refer to this link.