Copyright ©

In yesterday's PPP session we were taught about copyright. I was aware of it's existence and that basically you shouldn't steal people's things and copy it and make it your own, but I never really knew a great deal about it, as you've probably already guessed from the description of copyright I just gave.

So lets rephrase it.

Copyright basically means that you can't copy, adapt, rent, lend, or distribute an authors work without the owners permission. If you are using the work for non-commercial reasons, for example things like education, research, private study, you don't generally need permission to use it, but you can not make copies without an agreement.

But then again there are different types of copyright that have different leways, which I had no idea existed. One example is Creative Commons. Creative Commons is a non profit organisation that provides legal frame work so that people are able to share their work and ideas. It basically allows others to take your work and tweak and distrube it provided that they credit you and licence their new work under similar terms. So basically it's a good way of getting your name out there the way I see it, as the minute the new work becomes copyrighted and they start taking credit for the entire work they are infringing the copyright licence.

I found this class very useful as I didn't have the foggiest when it came to copyright. If there's one thing that I took away from the talk is that I should start putting the copyright "stamp" on works that I am proud of, especially when I reach my second and third year of university, and because there is no registration system in the UK. So why not?