COPYRIGHTS

The firm can assist you with pursuing copyright protection, as well as validity and infringement analyses, copyright registration searches, and licensing and enforcing your copyrights.

Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there may be some similarities among these kinds of intellectual property protection, they are different and serve different purposes.

What is a Copyright?

Copyrights are a form of protection provided to the authors of "original works of authorship" including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and certain other intellectual works, both published and unpublished. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyrights the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted work, to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work, to perform the copyrighted work publicly, or to display the copyrighted work publicly.

Copyrights protect the form of expression rather than the subject matter of the work. For example, a description of a machine could be copyrighted, but this would only prevent others from copying the description; it would not prevent others from writing a description of their own or from making and using the machine. Copyrights are registered by the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.