Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
- None of my stuff is copyrighted. I'm not even sure how to do that. Do I need to send it to a publisher for something like that? Can I just do it myself? Could I just keep my originals in dated, sealed envelopes? What are the itellectual property rules for something like this?
MattyC
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First of all good luck in this endeavour!
Now, actually your stuff is protected by copyright. The fact that you created it is enough to give your copyright over the material.
What you may not have is evidence of copyright; the most formal way of doing this is registering for copyright with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. However, for most creative endeavours, this would be overkill, unless you start to find that you're getting so many copyright disputes that enforcing them is problematic. I also have no idea what would be involved in copyright registering an ongoing work like a comic.
The CIPO has a good primer here:
http://www.cipo.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ci...n&wt_cxt=learn
It's not as though someone else can simply register copyright of your work because you don't (as is said to happen with patents). Someone else would need to prove that they created the work. The fact that the material first appeared on your site, plus the fact that you've got the originals (if you do hand-draw it), should be more than enough. So just make sure that every image has a copyright symbol, and date on it and either your name or your url.
The hardest part of copyright today is actually knowing when someone is infringing. Writers who publish their work online usually use a google-alert to know if their work is being republished online elsewhere. (You choose some unique phrases from the work, set up a google alert for these phrases, and you'll get notified if google picks them up in a search engine.) I don't know if there's a way to do this for images, beyond using google image search on some of your images and just checking them manually from time to time.