Home Schooling with Writing.com

         Copying off of someone else’s work, their writing, their story plot, a photo they took, things like that, and then going out and saying you did all the work, is something called plagiarism, just another form of stealing. If you copy someone else's work, and say they did it, it’s still wrong. That’s called copyright violation. Even though you give the original author credit, you still would be able to do whatever you want with the work. You could do things that the original author never even thought about being done to their work.

         If you create something, something that you made up completely, without any ideas from anyone else’s work, it’s called intellectual property. It could be a picture you painted, a specific design you made up, anything, as long as it’s totally your creation. If you create something that you’ve worked hard on, something you’re proud of, and you don’t want people using your ideas, you could copyright it. If you copyright something, it protects people from copying your work without your permission. When you copyright your work, that copyright lasts all your life, and then it’s still protected for 70 years more. That way, nobody can wait until you die so that they can copy your stuff without having to get permission from you.

         However, some things you can’t copyright. You can’t copyright a name you make up, facts, a location, or individual words or phrases, though the trademark law protects most brand names. You also can’t copyright an idea you have. If you’re worried about people using your good ideas, then just don’t give them to people. The thing to do is first use your idea, and then, if it’s that important to you, you copyright it, and then people can’t use your idea.

         Once the copyright runs out on something, or if it never was copyrighted in the first place, it is now in the public domain. That means that you can now use some of the material from something, as long as you’re sure that it’s not copyrighted anymore. If you write a story or something based on something else, it’s called a derivative work. You could write a book based on a movie, draw something based on a famous painting, just about anything. Though you have to make sure that no one else has redone it first, so you can make sure you don’t copy any of their ideas.


A summery of “Copyright Essentials” by Jessiebelle™
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