How do you gain copyright protection?

Here’s how:

Record your work – Your song, artwork, poem or novel cannot be copyrighted if it’s kept locked inside your head. (How then could you prove your case if there was infringement?) Your work therefore should be set down in a tangible form using the appropriate medium (be it film, tape, disc, the written word, paint, etc.), for copyright to come into effect.

Originality – your work must be original. By this, we don’t just mean, “Don’t copy someone else’s work”. Nor do we mean that it must contain entirely new ideas or concepts to be original. Originality rather comes from your expression of your ideas. That is, it’s not the idea you’ve had, but the form; how you’ve chosen through your artistic and intellectual skills to communicate it and bring it to life, which makes your work original.

While under the law the above are all you must do to obtain automatic copyright protection, there is something else you can do to add to your copyright protection arsenal: copyright register your work.

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