Do I Need to Copyright and Trademark My Work?

Copyright and trademark are legal devises used to protect intangible intellectual property. What is intangible intellectual property? Intangible intellectual property encompasses all original content, including text, graphics and sound. This article, for example, is a piece of intellectual property. Copyright law prevents readers from "stealing" it and passing it off as their own.

Trademark differs from copyright. Trademarks are designed to protect what is known as "branding," which is a specific form of intellectual property. No matter how good of a chef you are, you cannot grill up some burgers, add some cheese, lettuce and tomatoes, and put up a sign calling your business Burger King. Burger King, for better or worse, is a name brand; it's a registered trademark protected under law.

Whether you should affirmatively copyright or trademark your work depends on the circumstances. In fact, original content is automatically protected by copyright law, whether you register it or not, whether you give others notice or not. Just by my writing it, this article is copyrighted.

For this reason, it is not always necessary to affirmatively copyright your work. In other words, it is not always essential to register it with the U.S. Copyright Office. But there are circumstances in which you'd be well served to take the extra time and expend the extra effort to do so. If your intellectual property has real value, it is best to further protect it. Registering and giving notice of copyright serves as evidence in intellectual property cases. In most cases, it'll prove conclusively that the work in question belongs to you.

Registration and notice of copyright also give copyright laws their teeth. There are provisions in the copyright law that could help you to recover additional damages, including attorneys' fees.

It should be noted that copyright law does not protect ideas. If you wish to write an original novel about a Harvard professor who specializes in symbols and discovers the Holy Grail, go right ahead. Author Dan Brown knows this, which is why he successfully defended himself against allegations that he stole another author's ideas in creating "The Da Vinci Code."

Likewise, copyright law does not protect systems, procedures or methods. It does not protect facts or clerical content. It does not protect content that is in the public domain or content authored by the United States government. And copyright law doesn't protect content that is truly trite. That is why you and I can say, "That's hot," all we want without paying a cent to hotel heiress Paris Hilton.