In the present highly competitive world, everyone wants to make more and more profit. For this, people sometimes may follow the unlawful path of copying and using others’ work without seeking permission. To avoid such happenings that lead to infringement of their work, owners usually use copyrights. Undoubtedly, the Registered Copyrights facilitate the original creators to prevent unauthorized users from making profits in this manner. However, this way of avoiding infringement issues does not apply to all sorts of things. So if you have written the upcoming hit song, crafted a slogan, or come up with a recipe, ensure whether you can copyright them or not.
Things that can be Copyrighted
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), including copyrights, trademarks, and others are country-specific. Here, we are discussing the rights as per the US Copyright Office, which states that copyrights protect the things that exist in tangible form.
The Copyright Law extends to the protection of the author’s original work, which is in tangible form. The word “Original” signifies that the owner created the work by his intellectual efforts, not by copying it from any existing one. The protection may extend to an explanation, illustration, or description in written form.
In other words, we can say that copyrights cannot protect the idea you shared with anyone verbally. However, if you write down that idea, then it is likely to get copyright protection.
Note that a few things are unable to attain protection by copyrights even if they are in tangible form.
Things that can’t be Copyrighted
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Ideas, Systems, or Methods
Things like ideas, methods, or systems cannot be copyrighted. Items included in this section are building materials, business operations or processes, mathematical principles, formulas, algorithms, and scientific or technical approaches. Copyright law safeguards the expression of ideas or thoughts, not the ideas themselves. An idea signifies a work that does not exist in tangible form.
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Commonly Known Information
It includes things that hold no known (original) authorship and thus, considered as common property. For example – statements like “The sky is blue” cannot get copyrighted. It is because no known authorship is associated with such statements. Other examples encompass standard calendars, telephone directories, rulers, tape measures, lists or tables derived from public documents, and height and weight charts.
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Choreographic Works
Choreographic works, regardless of them being original or not, cannot attain copyright protection unless their creator either videotape or notate them. The same policy applies to speeches, and the owners are unable to get the copyright if they don’t transcribe their speeches before or after giving them.
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Blank Forms
Copyright protection is not applicable in case of blank forms, including time cards, diaries, graph papers, and address books.
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Names, Titles, Phrases, or Expressions
Copyrights don’t emphasize protecting the catchy slogans, product descriptions, titles of works, pseudonyms, and names you came up with for representing your business. Ingredients of recipes, formulas, prescriptions, or label also fall under the same category. However, copyrights protect exceptions like cookbooks that provide instructions and explanations.
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Useful articles
Copyright law does not consider protecting things that have utilitarian functions. For example, clothing, home appliances, and automobiles. However, exceptions such as building design can be copyrighted because it is an artistic expression also.
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Laws
It includes all those works that fall under the public domain, such as cases, regulations, constitutions, court decisions, and statues.
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Work by the federal government
The federal US government creates a wide range of works. All these works including memos, rules, reports, and documents, are not permitted to get copyrighted. On the other hand, state governments are liberal to copyright their work.
Bottom Line
Though copyrights facilitate the Intellectual Property (IP) owners to protect their assets, yet it is not prudent to completely rely on these rights as they don’t cover everything. However, the creators do have some other approaches, namely trademarks and patents, to protect those things that are not protected by copyright. So rather than being worried by thinking that copyrights do not apply to the protection of some assets, it is vital to understand what copyrights can or can’t safeguard. Apart from this, you should also have insight into which type of Intellectual Property Rights can be used to protect the product that copyrights cannot. For more visit: https://www.trademarkmaldives.com
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