Copyright
You may have heard the mantra “Copyright law does not protect ideas, but rather it protects the expression of ideas.” Copyright law is based upon legal rights granted by the Copyright Act of Antigua and laws of other countries to promote the progress of the arts, by protecting authors, musicians, artists and those in the creative industry exclusive rights to their respective creations for a limited period of time. Almost all forms of expression that are fixed in a tangible medium, original, and are minimally creative will be subject to copyright protection. By utilising copyright law, a creator or inventor will be granted a valuable legal right to use, protect, and license their creation.
HOW CAN I COPYRIGHT MY MATERIAL:
When someone says his work is "copyrighted" he might, depending on who is talking, mean either of two things. First he might be trying to say that a copyright registration on the work has been obtained from theU.S. Copyright Office. A different person who says a work "is copyrighted" might mean that the work is protected by the laws of his particular country.
Like in the United States, an original work in the West Indies becomes protected by the copyright laws from the moment it is "fixed in a tangible medium". This provides several obvious examples of ways that a work could fail to be protected by the copyright laws: the work might contain no originality, or it might not be fixed in a tangible medium. Yet another example is if a work has gone into the public domain, perhaps because the term of copyright has expired or because the owner has dedicated the work to the public prior to the expiry of the copyright term.
From this it becomes clear that the answers to the question "what must I do to protect my software through copyright" is, roughly, "fix it in a tangible medium". This is a fairly simple step, one which probably occurred no later than when the author stored the software on a hard disk or floppy disk or when a songwriter wrote his/her song down.
Services offered by CASSELL & LEWIS include:
HOW CAN I COPYRIGHT MY MATERIAL:
When someone says his work is "copyrighted" he might, depending on who is talking, mean either of two things. First he might be trying to say that a copyright registration on the work has been obtained from theU.S. Copyright Office. A different person who says a work "is copyrighted" might mean that the work is protected by the laws of his particular country.
Like in the United States, an original work in the West Indies becomes protected by the copyright laws from the moment it is "fixed in a tangible medium". This provides several obvious examples of ways that a work could fail to be protected by the copyright laws: the work might contain no originality, or it might not be fixed in a tangible medium. Yet another example is if a work has gone into the public domain, perhaps because the term of copyright has expired or because the owner has dedicated the work to the public prior to the expiry of the copyright term.
From this it becomes clear that the answers to the question "what must I do to protect my software through copyright" is, roughly, "fix it in a tangible medium". This is a fairly simple step, one which probably occurred no later than when the author stored the software on a hard disk or floppy disk or when a songwriter wrote his/her song down.
Services offered by CASSELL & LEWIS include:
- Copyright clearance
- Copyright sales and transfers
- Licensing of copyrighted works
- Obtaining permission for use of third party works
- Proof of creation and ownership
- Protection from infringement by third parties
