Protecting Your Company's Intellectual Property: A Practical Guide to Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents & Trade Secrets

Businesses generally possess a wealth of copyrightable information. Literary works, meaning those expressed in letters and numbers, possessing a minimum of creativity, are eligible for copyright protection. Works need not have artistic merit to qualify for copyright protection. Thus, even advertising and marketing materials, POWER POINT^® presentations, and other audiovisual works qualify for protection. Although ideas, systems, and methods are not protectable under copyright law, even forms used by businesses are copyrightable if they measure up to some minimum threshold of creativity. There are many advantages to securing a federal copyright registration, but copyright protection exists from the time a work is created in fixed form, and no advance permission is required from the U.S. Copyright Office to use a copyright notice. Because of the ease of dissemination of works using the Internet, companies must aggressively protect their works from infringement by others.

Copyright is a form of intellectual property protection that protects original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible form of expression, including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright registration is inexpensive and easily accomplished.

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