It surprises me how many people never copyright their documents when it is one of the basic ways to provide protection for your work as an author.
Copyright is represented by the symbol followed by the name of the author or publisher and the year in which it was published.
Copyright J Black 2002.
This may be followed with All Right Reserved, or All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
Why Copyright?
Copyright gives the author or the publisher the legal ownership rights to control production, sale and distribution of particular documents or images.
Protecting your intellectual property is a vital part of creating and selling your own digitally published works.
Registering your copyright establishes a public record of your copyright worldwide.
An excellent resource on the subject can be found at Brad Templetons site which I recommend as a must read by anyone interested in protecting their work…
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
When you run an online business be aware of the copyright laws in other countries and compare them with your own country’s laws and how they may also apply to you.
The information in government documents is usually not copyright and available for use by everyone, but always check to be sure.
When you have created your e-book you do not want an un-authorised party to illegally copy your work or claim it as theirs.
Along with the other pirating proliferating on the net the stealing of ebooks is growing at an alarming rate.
There have been many cases where authors have found their work on other author’s sites under the name of the other author. If your work is copyrighted you can at least legally sue for copyright infringement.
You can password protect your e-book and other documents to make cyber piracy of your work more difficult, but PC’s and the document compiler software you use can never provide total security against the determined cyber thief.
It is estimated that every year music, text and image files that are worth an estimated $10 billion to their copyright owners are illegally copied over the internet.
When this kind of theft occurs it can go on for quite some time before you find out resulting in a loss fame, recognition and sales revenue which should have been yours.
Copyright law covers most material on the Internet and extends to text and images placed on another person’s web site. If a feature does not appear to have a copyright marker you should still assume it is copyright and requires permission before using.
Use the Meta tag element to embed copyright into your HTML documents or web pages.
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Similarly the authors name can be embedded in a Meta tag.
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Copyright those documents before you find you are a victim with no legal rights because you have failed to take the the simple precautionary step of placing a copyright marker on your work.
Jill is a home business person with a portfolio of easy to operate business ventures and owner of Net writing and Publishing success a site offering ways to advance your Career or start a home business through writing. This site can be viewed at: http://www.netwrite-publish.com
