We live in a world where everything is digitized.
Can you imagine your life without multimedia? You cannot, right? We are bombarded with media content through the devices we use such as computers, phones, or tablets.
And least did we know who was behind the creation of these multimedia.
Copyright – what is it?
Copyright is a legal term. It is used to describe the creator’s right over their work.
Yes, no one can deny that digital advancement has been one of the finest creations, it has opened its gates to an enormous possibility in different industries such as education, medicine, entertainment, advertisement, communication, etc.
Howbeit, the easy access to content available on the web has made it easy for copyright infringement.
With digitalization, people get access to other’s content easily, thereby enabling them to replicate, copy the content produced by others.
Why is it important?
- Copyright allows the owner to protect or safeguard their work or creation against illegal usage, or duplication of their work.
When someone commits an unlawful act, it will be considered as copyright infringement.
- It provides legal protection to your work. When you register your work under copyright, it will serve as proof that it is your work, thereby providing you the legal protection.
- When someone translates or edits your creation, you can remunerate for that. The best example is YouTube, where contents are altered and utilized.
- It offers you the licensing right. As a copyright owner, you have the ability to license your work to others. And only when you have enough confirmation, you will be able to sign a license agreement with the licensee and the licensor.
Pro tip- If you wish to get specialists assistance to get copyright for you work, you can reach out to them. Sending an email would be a good option. You can use an email lookup tool like GetEmail.io to find email addresses.
It does not mean that you cannot copy anything from the internet, there are some exceptions. For instance, creative commons, fair dealing, etc.
Creative commons are a set of licenses that lets authors decide exactly how people could use their creation and for what purpose.
Overall, there are six types of licenses available such as if you are the owner, you can have your name recognized, you can decide whether or not your original content can be altered, can others make money off using your creation, etc.
Besides this, if you wish, you could let people share all your work with the same creative common license.
And fair dealing is the circumstances where people do not have to seek permission from you to use your creation. This applies to situations where;
- They are not infringing on your profits
- Your creation is used for education, review, criticism, etc.
- You are given a satisfactory attribution
Final thoughts
Although digitalization has increased the opportunities for the creators to present their creations to the world effectively, it is accompanied by the risk of ownership infringement.
And copyrights are intended to secure the ownership of a person for their content so that no one else takes credits for their effort.