My Rights to Copy

Is it just me, or have the number of robo diaries exploded recently?  I guess the OD Captcha is on vacation.

I am now an officially registered U.S. copyright holder.  I got my semi-official looking notification in yesterday’s mail.  I am hoping that I can now get a badge with a flippy wallet to hold it, so I can stop people in the street and flip open my badge and say "copyright holder, can I ask you a few questions?".

Things have been rather difficult, strained, irritating at work for nearly six months now, and I decided to get myself a registered copyright to protect some of my work.  Mostly, I don’t mind admitting, to make it very difficult for my management to screw me out of my intellectual property.  Does that make it sound like there are trust issues in my department?  Well, it should.

I’ve been putting "Copyright (year), Ender" on items I’ve created for as long as I’ve been creating things that I think might have value.  When I was selling action photos to members of my high school football team I even had a rubber stamp with my copyright.  When I got serious about copyrighting a couple of months ago, my research told me that this form of self copyrighting is a legal first step toward copyright protection.  Another method of poor man’s copyrighting, especially for authors, is to mail yourself a copy of your intellectual property.  Keeping the unopened, postmarked envelope helps establish a creation date for your material.  You probably couldn’t win a copyright infringement case with just your unopened envelope, but it might help to show that your "art" was on paper on such-and-such a date.

So how did I get a registered copyright?  I filled out the online form, submitted the PDF copy of my source code and paid my $35.

I did have a small issue with my registration.  I was copyrighting my most recent version of the source code and inside the code I had a comment claiming copyright since my first version in 2005.  I got a nice email explaining the problem along with a suggestion that I claim the previous versions as "previous materials."  Technically, I only have a 2012 registered copyright but I feel confident that I would be able to show my previous source code if someone ever claimed copyright to my previous materials.

If things go badly (more badly?) at work, I would expect that someone will try to claim that I wrote my application(s) while employed with this company and that fact somehow entitles them to my intellectual property.  Funny thing about intellectual property in most states of the U.S., unless you specifically sign away your IP rights you retain them.  Even if you are developing IP on the job, using job provided toold.  My job description doesn’t include programming or applicaton development, so no one ever asked me to sign an IP release.  I’ve been putting my poor-man’s copyright on all my code, even on my Excel macro code, since I started here.  If I go, it all goes with me, and if it doesn’t go with me then I have grounds for a copyright infringement claim.

If I can’t get a badge and flippy wallet I suppose I should consider a nice frame and matting for my first official registered copyright notification.

Ender is out.