1. Copyright does not protect ideas. It protects only the expression of those ideas. Thus, if you have an idea about a movie thriller where someone crash lands on another planet or a romantic comedy about a couple who are just “friends” until the tension builds to a boil or software that allows people to share their hobbies and interests and create virtual groups with common hobbies and interests, it is the expression of those ideas in a screenplay or computer software or website that is protectible, not the ideas themselves.
2. Copyright protection in a work, which may take such forms as a text, an audiovisual work such as a video or motion picture, a sound recording, a musical work, a photograph, an architectural drawing or a choreographic work, is secured automatically once a work is created, in other words, when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time.
3. However, unless registered in the U.S, which currently costs $35.00, if filed electronically, you cannot sue for infringement of your copyrighted work and unless you register that copyrighted work and unless registration is made within 3 months after publication of your work or prior to an infringement of your work, you cannot get statutory damages and attorney’s fees. This means that if you wait and your work is infringed you will have to prove the amount of your actual damages and the infringer’s profits to obtain relief from that infringement.
4. If your employee created the text, recording, website, photograph, video, etc., you, as the employer owns it. Otherwise, the creator or author of the work is the owner of the copyright in that work. You would own the copyright in a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if you and the author expressly agreed in a written instrument signed by both parties that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. Otherwise the author owns the work, not you. So the next time you hire a photographer, software engineer, graphic designer, website designer or videographer to document an important family moment, the office Christmas party, or your new offices, or create your new web site or write your new accounting program, remember it’s his, not yours, unless before he starts work he signs an agreement granting you the copyright in his work.
The owner of a copyright obtains the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords; to prepare derivative works based upon the work; to distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending; to perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works; to display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and in the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
