Understanding Copyright notes

Copyright is hard to maintain for your work, especially with the inclusion of the internet, where people can take your work and claim it as their own.

• To make the copyright symbol - alt + G for Macs and Ctrl +alt +c for PC  =  © 
• Copyright gives the owner the right to control the way that their material can be used.
• What is copyright? Copyright is a form of contract, telling the public that this piece of work belongs to you. That means that no one can copy, adapt, distribute it, present in public or performance, renting and lending without permission.
• What can be copyrighted? Films, Games, Animations, Music, Computer Apps, and Drawings/illustrations.
• What can you copyright? Work that you have solely produced or that of a collaborative effort. 
• Any content that is posted onto the internet that is made by you is automatically copyrighted in the UK. In the UK copyright is automatic.
• Who owns copyright? The author or creator in music, literary or works of drama. For example, for illustrations the creator and/or the company or employer that has commissioned them. However Copyright can be transferred or sold to another party only if legally transferred to own rights. 
• The duration of copyright varies but literature, artistic, photography and drama works remain under the persons copyright during their life time and 70 years after that.
• Getting permission to use work that is under copyright - contact the owner directly or contact the company/organisation who represents them, for example a record company. However you do not always have to seek permission but you have to when using the imagery or works for commercial purposes that require multiple copies. 
• To prove that the work is yours to begin with, if another person has claimed it is theirs, is to leave the original with a bank or solicitor or post it to yourself making sure there is a date stamp on it and that will prove it existed at a particular point in time. 
• Make sure you talk to people who are using your work and mark up the footer of your web pages with the copyright symbol, your name and year information.
• When posting work online onto other websites, ensure to read the terms and conditions, some websites may reuse your work without asking.
•  There are alternative Copyrighting solutions such as Copyleft. Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to maintain copyright conditions of works. Under Copyleft, an author may give every person who receives a copy of work permission to reproduce, adapt and distribute it. A complete opposite to the standard Copyright.
• Creative Commons (CC) is another alternative Copyright solution which was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig. CC is a non for profit organisation that provides a legal framework to allow people to share and reuse. 
• Copyright can also be used as a form of promotion, such as allowing a small cluster of people to reuse the image, can attract a different audience of consumers.