- 16 - CHAPTER 2
determination will depend on certain laws (such as work for hire in some instances) and on the terms of the employment or contractor agreement, university or school policies, and terms of enrollment at the particular institution, even though they are the creators and may have moral rights.
- If you have co-created an original work that is subject to copyright, you may be a joint owner, not an exclusive owner, of the rights granted by copyright law. Joint ownership generally allows all owners to exercise the exclusive rights granted by law, but requires the owners to be accountable to one another for certain uses they make of their joint work.
- Ownership and control of the rights afforded by copyright laws are complicated. For more information, please see the “Additional Resources” section at the end of this chapter.
- Copyright does not protect facts or ideas themselves, only the expression of those facts or ideas. This may sound simple, but unfortunately it is not. The difference between an idea and the expression of that idea can be tricky, but it’s also extremely important to understand. While copyright law gives creators control over the expression of an idea, it does not allow the copyright holder to own or exclusively control the idea itself.
! NOTE The combination of very long terms of copyright protection with automatic entry into the copyright system has created a massive amount of “orphan works”—copyrighted works for which the copyright holder is unknown or impossible to locate.
- As a general rule, copyright is automatic the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium. For example, you have a copyright as soon as you type the first stanza of your poem or record a song in most countries. Registering your copyright with a local copyright authority allows you to officially record your authorship, and in some countries this may be necessary to enforce your rights or might provide you with certain other advantages. But generally speaking, you do not have to register your work to become a copyright holder.
- Copyright protection lasts a long time. We will say more about this later, but for now it’s enough to know that copyright lasts a long time, often many decades after the creator dies.
