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If you're the author of a creative work,
your ownership of that copyright is automatic
subject to any
employment agreement that says otherwise.
You don't have to register the copyright
with any authority unless you choose to.
It can be a useful thing to do. You can for a small amount of money.
You don't have used a little c copyright symbol
on a creative work in Canada.
Not a canadian law but it is the case under some foreign laws so it's
generally a good practice to do so.
Copyright lasts a long time.
In canada the law is that it lasts fifty years past
the death of the author and that's a good thing because it means that copyrighted
materials continue
to generate revenues for a long time
even in the state of the
of the author.
It's different in different countries in the world.
In united states up until recently it was seventy five years past the
creation of the copyrighted material
and recently the U.S. congress extended that seventy five years to ninety years
because of very
expensive invaluable a piece of intellectual property
was about to lose its copyright go to the public domain that was actually mickey
mouse because the first cartoon
containing a little animated mouse that looked like mickey mouse
called steamboat willie
occurred sometime in the nineteen twenties
and disney was about to lose its copyright on mickey mouse so
they rushed through congress
to extend the copier picture for another fifteen years because as you can imagine
the
the images mickey mouse is worth millions and millions of dollars printed
on t-shirts to make cartoons
and so on and so forth.
Protecting software is an interesting and complicated case.
When you copyright software, you're protecting the written code
but you're not protecting what that code does. Now you can protect what that code
does through a patent application in some cases if what you've done is
very new, useful and obvious criteria patent law.
Now a lot of people don't apply for patents on software for very good
reasons. Number one, patening is very expensive.
Tens of thousands of dollars to get a patent issued.
It takes a long time typically to be several years for your
patent will be examined and issued
and by the time you get this patent out
whatever software you've written made no longer be relevant it may be
obsolete may be solved the problem doesn't exist anymore.
So whether or not you just copyright or whether you
keep software secret, keep the source code secret or whether you patent depends very much on
what your strategy for commercialization is.
If for example you're trying to start a company and you're trying to
interest venture capital private investors in your company
you may want to patent because the investors will want to see that there's
a physical asset protected to the intellectual property that is a patent
application or an issued patent.
So it really depends on a lot of factors and you have to look at
you know really what you're trying to do a probably get some external advice
as to the right ways to protect intellectual property and software products.