Copyrighting Your Work

This section discusses how to Copyright your works, either implicitly with the Berne Copyright Convention, or explicitly with a formal Copyright notice.

Berne Copyright Convention
Under a convention of the Law called the Berne Copyright Convention, all creative works are copywritten the moment they're in a tangible form.

Tangible form means almost anything other than in your head. Simply dreaming of the world's greatest Web site isn't enough to protect your ideas by Copyright. But once it's in a material form, it's protected. This means that, regardless of whether or not you see a Copyright noticed affixed to a newspaper, Web page, piece of fine art—it's most likely Copyright material, if it's original.

However, many people have never heard of the Berne Copyright Convention. And many people, for some strange reason, fail to respect that most Web site material is Copyright protected, unless they see an explicit Copyright notice (and even then some people don't care). It's to your advantage to place a formal Copyright notice somewhere on your Web site—or on every page. You may not prevent people from stealing your work, but it may deter some people, it makes some people stop and think about whether they really want to "borrow" your material, and it can help you out in case you decide to press charges against someone for Copyright infringement.

Formal Copyright Display
There are three standard ways to display a Copyright notice:

• Display a C with a circle around it: ©, which is written © or ©

Write out the word "Copyright," followed by the date and the name of who owns the Copyright (the creator):
Copyright 1998 by DevX.com, Inc.

Write out "Copr.," followed by the name of whoever owns the Copyright and the date:
Copr. 1998 by DevX.com, Inc.

You can also register a trademark by writing:

• ® which is written in HTML as "® for Registered Trademark, or,
  
  
• ™ which is written as "™ .

Check out our HTML reference section for more info on Special Characters, such as the Copyright and Trademark symbols.

As you've probably noticed, we place a Copyright notice on the bottom of Project Cool pages. There's one on the bottom of this page. It's not that we don't trust you—it's just a matter of common sense to help protect hard work from being duplicated elsewhere.

You probably wouldn't like it if you were searching the Web one day and you found a site that looked exactly the same as a site you created. In fact, you'd probably be pretty mad if you saw one graphic on another site that was a copy of something you created. Stealing sound from someone's Web site is the same thing, and it has serious legal repercussions. Besides, it just isn't a nice thing to do.