The basis for copyright law in the US is found in the US Constitution in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 as follows:

Promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, assuring for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right over their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The first copyright law was the Copyright Act of 1790. We currently operate under the Copyright Act of 1976 as amended.

Copyright is valid for the life of the author over 70 years. We Boomers can thank Sonny Bono (Sonny and Cher) for this. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, also known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, establishes the current term of copyright.

When you write original content, it is protected by copyright even if you do not specify “Copyright” or use the copyright symbol “circle C” ©.

However, it is better to declare that your works are copyrighted. The correct way to do it is “Copyright © (Date of first creation) (Author’s name).

The best way to approach the use of any information that you did not create yourself is to consider it to be copyrighted.

In order to copyright an item, you need to establish a dated record of some sort when you first created the item so that you can prove the copyright date if anyone questions it. The earliest date will get the copyright. Before computers, one technique was to write the piece and certify it before a notary or a witness. Another technique was to enclose the article in an envelope and mail it to yourself. The postmark established the date.

We now have computers that record the file creation date for everything we record on them. This date becomes the copyright date.

All you have to do to copyright something is create it and follow the procedure specified above by specifying “Copyright © (Date First Created) (Author Name)” The use of the copyright symbol is not required.

The following procedure is for MS Word: To insert the copyright symbol, click Insert on the toolbar, click Symbol on the drop down menu and you will be presented with a table of all types of symbols. Highlight “circle C” and click the Insert button and the © will appear where your cursor is. You will need to click the Close button to close the Symbol box.

There, that was easy. Now start creating content where you can proudly hang that “circle C”.

Copyright 2006 John Howe, Inc.