What copyright protects and who owns it
Copyright protects the expression of a work rather than the ideas or facts in it, from the moment the work is fixed in some form, and an international convention extends that protection to most countries. The author owns it unless employment or a contract places it elsewhere, and who owns web content such as comments and blogs is often difficult to determine. The name and appearance a publication trades under can be protected separately, as trademarks.
What copyright protects
Under US law, copyright protects original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and certain other intellectual works, and the protection extends beyond the printed word: whoever creates a PowerPoint slide, writes an unpublished thesis or draws a diagram owns the rights to it. An image, a photograph, a graph or a video clip is protected as well as written text. Tweets have been deemed too small to be covered by copyright, but blogs, wikis and all other web content are protected just as strongly as any printed work.
Section 106 of the US Copyright Act of 1976 generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to reproduce the work, prepare derivative works based on it, perform it publicly in the case of performance art and display it publicly, and to authorise others to do these things.
Copyright does not extend to the ideas, concepts, principles, systems or factual information described in a work, and an improvised speech is not protected until it is written down. Slogans, short phrases, and data considered common and authorless property, such as standard calendars, height and weight charts, and tape measures and rulers, are not protected either. Copyright infringement is copying the expression of an idea without permission, with or without attribution.
Works in the public domain are free to use, but the public domain can be confusing, especially as the estates of long-dead authors still hold rights. Even a very old work may not be in the public domain: the dialogues of Plato may not be if the translation being used is still protected by copyright.
When protection starts
A work is protected by copyright from the moment it is fixed in some form, such as the written word, a painted canvas or an electronic word-processing file, and the protection under US and foreign law is immediate and automatic. Under the US Copyright Act the fixation need not be directly perceptible as long as it can be communicated with the aid of a machine or device, so medical writers should afford online creative works the same copyright respect as printed material. No publication is needed: anything an author writes is protected under their national copyright law the moment it is written. So a work made public before publication is already protected by copyright, although many authors worry that someone will steal it.
Registration in the United States
As US law stood in 2008, registering a copyright with the US Copyright Office opened the courts to the holder to sue an infringer. If the registration occurred before the infringement, attorney's fees and statutory damages may be paid in a successful action for infringement, and statutory damages can rise to $150,000 per infringement where actual damages are too hard to prove. A self-employed freelance journalist's article will likely not be protected by the copyright registration of the newspaper that publishes it.
How long protection lasts
In 2008, US copyright protected a work for the lifetime of its author plus 70 years, and a work made for hire, whose author is the writer's employer, received a term of 95 years. So a song written in 2008 by a self-employed 20-year-old who lives to 75 stays protected in the United States until 2138, while the employer's copyright in the same song written by an employee expires in 2103, whenever the writer dies.
The US Constitution provides for copyright at Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, which gives Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries. The Copyright Act of 1790, passed at the first session of Congress, gave a term of 14 years, renewable for another 14, and copyright law has changed regularly since. Because the law changes often and is open to interpretation, the currency and accuracy of any amateur copyright advice, whether from an editor, an agent or an attorney, should always be verified.
Protection across borders
The protection of ideas and their expression goes far back: in ancient Greece the theft of ideas was identified as a crime, and plagiarism was punishable. The modern concept of copyright began in China in the eleventh century and in the Western world with the UK Statute of Anne of 1710, after which other countries such as France passed similar laws. Those laws worked only within national boundaries and did not protect works from being copied in other countries, until the Berne Convention, first signed in 1886 and last updated in 1979, made copyright a matter of international cooperation. Its signatories respect each other's copyright and give it the same protection as works published by their own nationals, and in 2012, 165 countries subscribed to it.
An author therefore has almost global protection: an article published in a German journal and made available in South Korea, digitally or in print, is protected within Korea under Korean law.
Who owns a work
Under the US Copyright Act, copyright becomes the property of the author who created the work as soon as the work is in some fixed form. A publisher or syndicate does not acquire the copyright simply by publishing: unless there is a signed contract to the contrary, the original author keeps it and the publisher acquires only a licence.
Ownership is not limited to the people who create works. One important exception to the author holding the copyright is the work made for hire, which includes a work an employee prepares within the scope of employment and a work ordered or commissioned, such as an instructional text or a translation. There may or may not be a written agreement that a work is made for hire, and many books are works made for hire by contract between author and publisher. Under a work-for-hire contract the employer is the author from the very beginning and the writer has no rights, while under an all-rights contract the writer holds the copyright first and transfers it to someone else, and the length of the term is still measured by the original author's life.
An employer may own the copyright in something an employee created as part of the employment. Universities and large research institutions do not usually enforce this, but large corporations and government agencies usually do, and practice varies between countries.
Who owns web content
Determining who owns the copyright in web content is often difficult. Where a journal's online article includes comments from the public, copyright in the comments may stay with the people who wrote them or may be assigned to the publisher of the website or journal, depending on whether the publisher included a licence agreement in the comment submission form. Copyright in a blog is usually owned by the owner of the blog site, as with a major science publisher that owns the copyright in all its blogs, but it may be owned by the individuals who write the entries, which is more often the case on less formal blog sites.
Ownership of the content a community posts on a writer's own web page or blog, such as comments, messages and contributed ideas, looks simple and is not. It raises the questions of whether the owner wants to reuse that content, who is responsible for it and what liability the owner carries, and a site owner who declares that they own all content posted on the page, including the followers', may also be liable, for example for copyright infringement. One experienced freelance writer advises that a freelancer has to manage their content rights, including those in what is on their own website.
Who enforces copyright
Management of intellectual property rights, and of copyright in particular, is usually handled by publishers on behalf of authors. An individual author who discovers that someone has copied their work is well served by the publisher, because publishers are used to investigating and challenging potential infringement, and most major publishers have the experience and resources to do it. Publishing associations also work on behalf of member publishers against international piracy. One author of a medical-writing guide holds that the law and the ethics of medical publishing protect an author's work quite well, so an author need not worry too much about the copyright in their own work.
Misconceptions about copyright lead to incorrect assumptions and accusations. They persist partly because national interpretations of the law differ and not every country has exactly the same laws, but mostly because authors fear losing something they have created and worry that publishers are taking advantage of them.
Names and marks
A trademark is the name or other symbol a manufacturer or dealer uses to distinguish its products from those of competitors, and what matters most is that it is readily recognisable, simple in appearance and eye-catching. A publication established for many years is likely to have a familiar appearance, and such a recognisable image can be vitally important in keeping its customers loyal. Its publisher may then want to register that image as a trademark, to keep other publishers from cashing in on it. The internet has significantly complicated the law governing trademarks, since advertising or images protected in one jurisdiction may clash with a similar trademark used legally in another country.
In UK practice described in 2007, the Patent Office could register a new trademark only if it was distinctive, not deceptive, and not in conflict with other registered trademarks. An application was advertised in the Trade Marks Journal, where others could make observations on it or oppose it. An opposition gave the applicant the chance to defend the application, could lead to hearings if either party requested them, and ended in a written decision that usually awarded costs against the unsuccessful party. Without opposition, outstanding observations or proceedings against it, the trademark was recorded in the UK Register of Trade Marks 15 weeks later and the applicant became its proprietor, the source of the term proprietary products for pharmaceuticals. To stay on the register a trademark had to be renewed every 10 years, and its proprietor could license others to use it. A proprietor who suspected counterfeiting was to consult the local Trading Standards Office or Trading Standards Central. The Patent Office's enquiry unit could arrange public searches of the register, by word or by device such as a logo, a smell or a sound, but its staff could advise neither on whether a proposed trademark was likely to be registered nor on infringement.
A domain name can be built on a registered trademark: the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's domain name, www.rpsgb.org.uk, comprises rpsgb, the registered trademark of the organisation that runs the website. When domain names first became available, some individuals and organisations registered well-known names, a practice called cybersquatting, either to seek payment, sometimes very high, from the organisations that might want those names, or to draw visitors who believed the site was run by the well-known organisation. Other registrants have taken variants of a famous name with a derogatory suffix, commonly "sucks".