Basic Info On Copyrights
How to copyright your own works:
Hit the "numberlock key" on your keyboard, hold down the "ALT key" and type in 0169 along with your "handle/nick as well as the year". This protects your work as your own!!
Example:
©Gothic Addiction All rights Reserved ©2007©
If you didn't write it, and you want to "reproduce "it, ask the creator, or assertain that it meets the complex public domain rules if it's pretty old. Most people don't really need to know much more than this. If you do, check the other documents.
Some legal basics
Under the Berne copyright convention, which almost all major nations have signed, every creative work is copyrighted the moment it is fixed in tangible form. No notice is necessary, though it helps legal cases. No registration is necessary, though it's needed later to sue. The copyright lasts until 70 years after the author dies. Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, only expressions of creative effort.
"If I make up my own stories, but base them on another work, my new work belongs to me."
<DIR> False. U.S. Copyright law is quite explicit that the making of what are called "derivative works" -- works based or derived from another copyrighted work -- is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work. This is true even though the making of these new works is a highly creative process. If you write a story using settings or characters from somebody else's work, you need that author's permission.
In
Summary <DIR> <DIR> These days, almost all things are copyrighted the moment they are written, and no copyright notice is required. Copyright is still violated whether you charged money or not, only damages are affected by that.
Postings to the net are not granted to the public domain, and don't grant you any permission to do further copying except perhaps the sort of copying the poster might have expected in the ordinary flow of the net. Fair use is a complex doctrine meant to allow certain valuable social purposes. Ask yourself why you are republishing what you are posting and why you couldn't have just rewritten it in your own words.
Copyright is not lost because you don't defend it; that's a concept from trademark law. The ownership of names is also from trademark law, so don't say somebody has a name copyrighted.
Fan fiction and other work derived from copyrighted works is a copyright violation.
Copyright law is mostly civil law where the special rights of criminal defendants you hear so much about don't apply. Watch out, however, as new laws are moving copyright violation into the criminal realm. Don't rationalize that you are helping the copyright holder; often it's not that hard to ask permission.
Posting E-mail is technically a violation, but revealing facts from E-mail you got isn't, and for almost all typical E-mail, nobody could wring any damages from you for posting it. The law doesn't do much to protect works with no commercial value.
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