Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Copyright does not exist as soon as the work starts to be created. You can think all you want about a work, imagine the storyline and the words you're going to use, or come up with a tune, and even whistle it. None of those things will be protected by copyright. Only when you write it down or otherwise record it in fixed form does a creation gain copyright protection.
Patents are an entirely separate issue. If you'd like to discuss patents, please start a different thread.
|
As soon as it starts to be written
or recorded in any fashion, it's copyright today. It doesn't have to written, a chapter of a book dictated (using ANY recording method) has the same rights as a published book.
Also Patents and Design Patents/Registered Design are absolutely copyright ALSO and that mess is an extension of copyright. An expired patent or invalid patent, unless plagiarised, is absolutely copyrighted. You can't at all discuss copyright reform without also considering Patents and Design Patents/Registered Design and even to an extent Trademarks, including the text, style and logo.
You can't copyright a title. Yet no-one can use the names of the Seven Dwarves in Disney's version of Snow White as the names of dwarves. Though that was written in maybe 1936. The actual non-Disney story is in the Public Domain.
Copyright isn't just the manuscript source of books, or books.