Copyright for Designers

According to Copyright website, "Copyright protects a range of materials, including artistic works, written material (such as journal articles, novels, and reports), musical works and films. Drawings logos, photographs and other visual images are likely to be protected by copyright as artistic works." Owners of copyright have the right to do only certain aspects with their material. Artistic works have the right to reproduce it, make it public, and communicate it to the public. Copyright owners can assign their own rights. The reason to have copyrights is to make sure you get credit for your actual creation so nobody else takes your image or project and calls it their own. Everyone has moral rights in respect of their own work. Copyright protection is available for all unprotected and protected works regardless of who created it. According to the Copyright website, there are eight categories that are protected by copyright laws, and they are literary works, musical works, dramatic works, pantomimes and choreographic works, graphic works, motion pictures, sound recordings, and architectural works.

Copyrights last for the duration of the persons life who created the material and then you add another 70 years on top of that until the copyright is no good anymore. Copyright affects images, content, fonts, and intellectual property all the same because like I just said, it last the duration of the persons life who created the works then you add another 70 years too it so really in the end you are copyright protected and nobody can take it away from you once you have it. You need to have a copyright registration form to prove it after you fill out the paper work because once you do that then it entitles you the copyrights of your creations. Registrations can be done either on paper or online, which ever one prefers to do.  There is also a small fee to create a copyright too. If anyone is caught infringing on copyright laws then it could lead to court and possibly jail time. Everything you find online is mostly protected by copyright also. There are certain sites that allow you to use their images, but you can only use so many and usually need a user name and password to get into the site like istock.com for example. There are restrictions on most though so be careful what you copy from the internet especially images and quotes from other peoples news articles or books. All the information I got this from was the Copyright website.