Video Transcript

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Hey, it’s Gary Schuster, your friendly neighborhood inventor and innovator, and this is Innovation Cafe. Today I just want to talk about copyrights. Now, we’ll look at US copyrights, but for the most part, most of the big economies are similar.

In the US, a copyright arises the minute your work is fixed in a tangible medium. Meaning, when you’re sitting at a table in a restaurant and you doodle a picture on the cocktail napkin, you immediately have a copyright in that picture. You just do — it’s automatic. You no longer have to do anything with the government to have a copyright.

In order to enforce the copyright, you do have to register it. So you can register it after it’s been infringed, in which case — depending on how long you took before registering it — you may still be able to get what’s called statutory damages, which means you don’t have to prove your actual harm from someone infringing your copyright. You just get a set amount of money per infringement. Those can be up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement.

Now, how long does a copyright last? In the US, for works created today, it’s the life of the author plus 70 years. That’s a really long time. For works made for hire — meaning you created it as part of your job — it’s 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

One thing people often get confused about: if someone takes a photograph of you, they own the copyright to that photograph, not you. The photographer is the author. So keep that in mind when you’re getting photos taken. That has been copyrights in about two minutes. I’m Gary Schuster, Innovation Cafe. Thanks for watching!