Because patents and trademarks must be legally registered, directors have to be involved. Copyright is automatic and free and usually does not need to be registered – which means it can sometimes be overlooked as a business asset.

Copyright is vital in the creative world for authors, film makers, musicians and artists; but it is also hugely important to all companies looking to protect their IP and intellectual assets. It covers any written or recorded works which are original and creative ‘works of the mind’. And it can apply to business documents like brochures, presentations and strategic plans, videos and photos a company uses in its marketing, sketches and drawings, web pages.

Importantly, for any company that creates its own software, copyright applies to the code, and to original structures of databases.

Copyright is a formally recognised intellectual property right which is broadly consistent across many international territories due to the signing of several international treaties such as the Berne Convention (which has 181 countries as signatories).

Copyright materials are protected by statute and related IP rights can be enforced in the courts. Aside from a few relatively limited exceptions, it is illegal to copy a substantial part or take the essence of a copyright piece of work without permission.

Copyright is long-lasting, covering a work from the moment it is created and recorded. In most countries, like the UK, there is no official copyright registry and you don’t have to register it. However, while you don’t have to register it, you should assert it when your works are made public.

Best practice is to label all copyright works (including on websites) with: “© [Company Name] 2024. All Rights Reserved” where the year is the date of creation. If the materials you are using have been created over a time period, then you can show this as a range, such as ‘2018-2024’.

This puts people on notice that your materials are copyright-protected and cannot be used without permission.

Establishing copyright ownership is an important issue which should be addressed when a work is created – or even before. That’s because it is the first creator of an original creative work who gets the copyright.

If you hire a freelance designer or agency to develop marketing materials, the designer or the agency, not your company, will own the copyright, unless you have a contract which specifically assigns copyright to your company.

However, if an employee of your company creates something as part of their normal duties, then by default the employer owns the copyright, not the employee.

Another point is that copyright protects the expression of an idea and not the idea itself.

So JK Rowling owns the copyright to Harry Potter and his world, and no-one else can use her characters or her world for books, films, toys, games and the like without her permission. But she would not have copyright over, for example, the concept of a school for witches and wizards.

The Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) lists the different kinds of copyright and their durations.

For literary, art, music, or dramatic works, in most countries, copyright lasts for 70 years after the creator’s death.

However, things get more complicated if, for example, you are dealing with ensemble works like films, TV programmes, and recorded music. There can be multiple ‘creators’ – not just the person who created the original work, but also anyone who had creative input into a version of it.

The same applies to editions of books and plays, as there might be creative input from designers, illustrators and others, separate to the original author.

Even if you aren’t a ‘creative company’, copyright is still hugely valuable for you. For example, you can stop employees taking your copyright ideas with them if they leave.

More importantly, you can stop rival companies making unauthorised use of your copyright materials.

For example, if you make a consumer tech product, watch out for people selling similar products by using your copyright materials – like brochures, guides, photos and even videos – to push their alternative versions.

This has become commonplace with the rise of the internet and e-commerce. Whatever industry you are in, you can and should stop other people using your copyright material without permission.

However, copyright is even more important for start-ups and scaleups which rely on software to generate revenue – either as a product or as part of a larger proprietary process.

Copyright protects both the uncompiled ‘source’ code and the compiled versions of software. Many companies depend on this protection when licensing revenue-generative software. It also protects code that is only used internally and never intentionally shared.  And it protects the design and structure of databases – what is called the ‘schema’ of the database – and protects the creative process of deciding what data to collect and store and in what format.

The data itself is a different matter. Unstructured or ‘raw’ data contained in a compilation of data in a database is not protected by copyright; however, if substantial skill, effort and investment has gone into its collection, it may attract a separate form of IP protection, called database rights.

To learn more about IP and understanding its value, visit Inngot.

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