Copyright & contracts

Copyright & Contracts 

Copyright is a topic that a lot of people nowadays don’t give it much attention, but it is really important for us to know about it specially if we are going into the media field. It is basically a form of way to protect our creative ideas and keeping it safe from other people that might use it without permission. Copyright can be done in many different ways, one of the most common one is to do it by writing a contract. A contract allows all your team members know what they can or can’t do with your projects. On the other hand, Copyright protects a way an idea is expressed, but does not protect the idea itself nor does it protect concepts, styles, techniques and information. Copyright is really complicated, people might know what copyright is but they don’t really know it by details. As an example given in class, the first owner of copyright is the first guy that created the work, it stays their own right until the owner makes a contract with some other people in a form of legal document but some exceptions might occur. People who are employed on staff and are working on creating material for newspapers or magazines will own most of the copyright but not all as the employee will own copyright for some purposes. On the other hand, freelancers own copyright on what they create because normally people that invest money to create something are not eligible of owning copyright.

Some people depend to make a living out of their own creative work, if copyright does not apply then everybody can use their work for free whether it was music or an idea or anything else. Adding to this topic, there is something called licensing. Licenses are giving by an authority to allow the usage of the product , for example, i may decide to give my photograph for people to use for free or let them pay a price but i am able to include a license to limit usage and i maintain the copyright. what i am trying to say is that just because someone pays money for my product doesn't mean they own full control to what they are buying.

To sum things up, everybody should know about copyright and understand how it can work in many different ways in order to guarantee your right and protect your own creative work since you are the one that worked hard to accomplish.