Intellectual property legal expert, Geetha Kandia from Kass International shared about your rights to the content you posted online such as Facebook status updates, tweets, and your blog posts. Watch the video below:
Work on the Internet is still a form of creative expression – your creative expression.
Intellectual Properties
You can take photographs of one of your paintings or some other creative work, and then decide to share it with everyone by putting it up on Instagram or another site. You can also write articles then post them on the Internet. Both of these are forms of creative expressions and they are covered by copyright, which in turn, is a type of Intellectual Property Right.
Intellectual Property is vast. It’s an umbrella term used for various types of rights like copyrights, trademarks, and patents. These rights protect creative expressions by individuals or groups of people like designs, trade secrets, and confidential information.
What falls under copyright
Now, what falls under copyright? Copyright protects original works that are created by someone either visually, through multimedia, through writing, through sound, done in three dimensions, or through motion. Examples of these are: paintings, photos, songs, novels, poems, plays, music, choreography, sculpture, buildings, movies, and computer games.
All these can be posted on the Internet. Songs can be put up on Youtube or Myspace. Novels can be published online. Pictures of your building designs or sculptures can also be uploaded and shared online. Computer programs also fall under copyright, although some are protected by patents depending on the type of software you’ve created.
What Copyright doesn’t cover?
Copyright, on the other hand, does not protect ideas, concepts, and facts. It only protects expressions that are contained in a medium. What does this mean?
If you have an idea, for example, and you discussed it in a coffee shop with a friend. You tell him, “Hey, I have this idea!” Let’s say your friend runs off, actually executes the idea and comes up with something – a play, a novel, or a book. They’ve put your idea into an expression, meaning they materialized whatever that idea is. Copyright, then, only protects the material that came out of the idea and not the idea itself.
Another example is a recipe book. Let’s say we have a recipe book about vegetarian cuisine from South India. In this recipe book, there will be various recipes in there. Now, if you talk about the recipe that your mom or grandmother has given you, and someone goes and writes a book with that information, and then sells the book – you can’t do anything about it.
They have taken the idea and expressed it in a book. You can’t sue them for anything because they’ve only taken the idea and you can’t protect an idea.
For Founder Method members, you can watch the full recording of the one-hour long session here:
