Copyright (Kayla)

Dear reader,

What is copyright? By definition it is "The legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work." (Farlex dictionary app) but does that make any sense to the normal human? No. So I'm going to spell it out for you.

Copyright is a way for authors (or other types of artists) to protect their work. Lets say you wrote a book that you were very proud of, you would be really upset if someone took your idea and made money from it. So instead of having your work stolen you can copyright it. To copyright your work it must be written down or in "fixed form" for it to be copyright able. If you told someone about your great idea but you hadn't write it down they could execute the idea and it would be perfectly legal. If someone were to "infringe" upon your work that was copyrighted, you could sue them for the money that they made while the work was used. When something is copyrighted other people must always ask permission from the author to use it, otherwise it is considered infringement. The qualifications for infringement are; the work must be "substantially similar" and the infringer must have access to the work. As the owner of your work you can make copies, perform it, display it, or make modifications to it. Lets say you had to do a report for work, you couldn't copyright that because the company you work for technically owns it. You can also "co-own" your work with someone such as if you wrote a blog with someone and wanted to copyright the entries. Copyrights last for 70 years.

Creative Commons licensing is an alternative of copyrighting. It lets people use your work but with a few rules. Some of the rules that you could possibly use are; attribution which means you must give credits to the author, non-commercial use means that your work cannot be used commercially, no derivative works which means it can be used but not modified, and share alike with the same licence means the work can be modified and altered as long as its released under the same licence as the original. Those are some of the rules of different Creative Commons.

I hope you enjoyed this mini copyright lesson. Thank you for reading!

-Kayla