Copyright

The copyright establishes the property rights of an artist over his creative work. The copyright is to a creative work what a patent is to an invention, or the trademark is to a brand. The concept of copyright is based on a particular cultural vision of both authorship and of private property. The concept of copyright has become especially important in the modern era, due to the emergent individualistic understanding of the nature of creativity.

Introduction to Copyrights

At the beginning of almost every book you have ever read, you have probably found the symbol of a little "c" with a circle around it, followed by a year. This is the copyright symbol. 

© is what it looks like.

Essentially, the copyright just refers to the fact that an author is the legal owner of his work. It is analogous to the concept of the patent: the patent is to inventions what the copyright is to creative works. The following content below, provided by Ultius, will give you further details about this term.

Copyright Examples

Here are a couple examples of the term copyright being used properly within the context of sentences. 

• "When the author saw that someone had reprinted a part of his book without his permission, he filed a lawsuit on the grounds of copyright violation."
• "The novel from three centuries ago can easily be found online now, due to the fact that the copyright protections held by the original author have long since expired."
• "The research paper was licensed under an open copyright agreement, because the author believed that all people should be able to access his work for free." 

In case you are still a little confused about the meaning of the term copyright, here are a couple rules for your reference. 

1. The author of a work always holds the copyright to his work, except in the case that he has legally licensed it to others or sold it for money. The concept of copyright is thus closely connected with the concept of authorship, and copyright first and foremost refers to the legal property rights of the author. 

2. The term copyright can be applied to any creative work, including books, films, and music. It must be differentiated, though, from the related terms of patent and trademark. It is easy to confuse copyright with trademark, since the latter usually also refers to words. A trademark, however, refers simply to the name of an object, and not to the content of a creative work. 

Legal Background Information

The concept of copyright is premised on a very specific understanding of property rights. Among other things, copyright presupposes the idea of individual property: that a given object can in fact belong to a single person and no one else. In the same way that car legally belongs to a given person after he signs a contract of purchase, the copyright declares that a creative work produced by an author really belongs to that author and no one else. Copyright issues have been so common in the internet era that various cybercrime laws and regulations have been established.

In practice, this essentially means that other people are prevented from claiming or using the object. Just as no one can use a person's car without his permission, copyright protection means that no one can reproduce an author's work without giving him proper credit. As an additional example, Ultius utilizes as a DMCA Copyright policy to help rightsholders remove any content on our site that is allegedly infringing on their original work.