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Copyrighting documents

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Copyright law is a complex field, and it's crucial for writers to understand what's entailed. Stephen Fishman covers what a copyright is, how it's created and protected, limitations and transfer of ownership, how long it lasts, and what copyright infringement is all about

The Copyright Handbook: What Every Writer Needs to Know

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Copyrighting your documents is one of the most basic ways, as an author, to provide protection for your work especially when it is to be placed on the Internet.

Copyright is represented by the symbol © followed by the year in which it was published and the name of the author or publisher.

Why Copyright?

Copyright gives the author or the publisher the legal ownership rights to control production, sale and distribution of particular documents or images.

Protecting your intellectual property is a vital part of creating and selling your own digitally published works.

Registering your copyright establishes a public record of your copyright worldwide.

James A Ritchie author of five published novels, ghost writer of three others, and author of some seventy-five published short stories offers these words on copyright.

"The copyright office does not copyright anything, and hasn't for many, many years. Anything you write is automatically and legally copyrighted the moment you write it. This is important. It has full copyright protection the moment you press a key on the keyboard.

There's quite a bit of confusion about copyright, largely because the copyright office is called "the copyright office" as though it actually copyrighted material, instead of just registering it.

All the copyright office does is give you a place to register your work so you can prove when you wrote it, if you think you'll need the proof someday. Essentially, all the copyright office does for their fee is say, "He sent a copy to us on this date, so we know the piece existed then. If someone is claiming they wrote it later than this date, they're wrong." If someone else can prove they had a copy earlier than the date the copyright office received it from you, the registration offers no protection at all. It isn't like the patent office where whoever gets something there first owns it.

I think you should register anything that's going to be placed on the internet, but you have to do so before it's placed there the first time, or someone can steal it before the date of registration.

If you aren't posting something on the web, I don't think it needs registration. I don't know a single professional writer in the print world who ever registers anything. It just isn't necessary."

The information in government documents is usually not copyright and available for use by everyone, but always check to be sure.

When you have created your e-book you do not want an un-authorized party to illegally copy your work or claim it as theirs.

Along with the other pirating proliferating on the net the stealing of e-books is growing at an alarming rate.

There have been many cases where authors have found their work on another author’s web site under the name of the other author. There have even been cases where entire web sites have been copied to another person's server (complete with e-books), along with a substantial loss of profits and after many hours of hard work have gone into building up a business.

If your work is copyrighted, even if this is an expensive option to enforce, you can at least legally sue for copyright infringement.

You can password protect your e-book and other documents to make cyber piracy of your work more difficult, but PC’s and the document compiler software you use can never provide total security against the determined cyber thief.

It is estimated that every year music, text and image files that are worth billions of dollars to their copyright owners are illegally copied over the internet.

When this kind of theft occurs it can go on for quite some time before you find out and with a loss of sales revenue which should have been yours.

Copyright law covers most material on the Internet and extends to text and images placed on another person's web site. If a feature does not appear to have a copyright marker you should still assume it is copyright and requires permission before using.

Use the Meta tag element to embed copyright into your HTML documents or web pages.

Similarly the authors name can be embedded in a Meta element.

Consider copyrighting your documents for the Internet before you find you are a victim because you have failed to take the simple precautionary step of placing a copyright marker on your work.

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