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Friday 8 September 2017

Basics One Should Know About Copyrights



Intellectual property refers to the creations of the human brain which includes creations related to both science and arts. Any inventions in the scientific field, artistic works in literature and other art forms like designs, images, symbols and names used for business - all come under intellectual property. Like any other property, intellectual property is also protected by law in the form of copyrights, patents, and trademarks. In a series of articles, let us try to understand each one of these.

Copyright: Copyright is a form of intellectual property right created by a country’s law that gives the creator of an original work the exclusive rights of ownership and usage. This is applicable to certain forms of creative work like literary works, paintings, live performances, photographs, movies and software. In some cases, copyrights may be shared by more than one person and in such cases; each of them has set of rights to use the creation. Persons who hold the rights to a creation are called copyright holders. Copyrights are generally given for a limited period of time and they are limited by the country’s copyright law limitations and exceptions. It should be understood that usually for any creation to be held under copyright it has to be in a tangible form. For e.g. a person cannot be given a copyright to a story if it is in his brain, but if he brings it out in a tangible form as a book, then the story-book copyright can be held by that person. 

Inclusions of copyrights - The main aim of intellectual property law is to protect the creator’s time, effort and creativity that have gone into the creation of a specific work. This will give the creator a sense of ownership and pride in the work and give the motivation to do much better in future. Following are certain exclusive rights that copyright holders have:


  • Reproduce work: This allows the copyright holders to reproduce their own work in any way at any time. This also means that it prevents other people from reproducing the original work in any form like duplicating all or some of the work or photocopying the original work.
  • Create derivative work: This right allows the copyright holder to transform the work into another work. For e.g. a story can be remade into a movie. This kind of transformation by others is prevented due to the copyright.
  • Distribute: The copyright holder can distribute copies of work by selling, leasing or transferring the ownership.
  • Perform publicly: This allows the copyright holder to perform the creation in public. For e.g. a musician who has composed a song can perform that song publicly while others can’t do that.
  • Display publicly: This allows to display the creation in public as a painter can display the pictures painted in an exhibition.



Apart from these rights copyright holders have an additional right to authorize someone to use anyone or all of these rights. They can transfer their exclusive rights to someone through an agreement. One thing to be remembered is that if a creation is made by a person for an employer or company, then the person does not get the copyright but, the company holds the copyrights for that creation.
Infringement of copyrights is an offence and has legal implications. So, one has to take necessary precautions to avoid such incidences. Accuprosys is a company that has a professional team which handles all your needs related to copyrights, patents and trademarks.

Visit: Accuprosys



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