Copyright registration service – Consider availing some of the low-cost copyright registration services for any artistic, literary, or other creative work.

Organisations – Look up several organisations that provide additional information on copyright and IP issues.

Forum on copyright issues – Access several forum discussions on issues related to copyright.

Catch a Tech Weekly podcast (Tech City talk) from the Guardian group, that features a discussion on Intellectual Property & Copyright in a digital age. The discussion panel on rights and ownership includes Ed Vaizey MP (minister for culture, communications and creative industries), Professor Ian Hargreaves (chair of digital economy at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies), Feargal Sharkey (chief executive of UK Music), Jonathan Haskel (professor of economics at Imperial College Business School) and Jeff Lynn (chairman of Coadec).

The panel attempts to answer such questions as – “How do we balance between the competing needs of the creative industry: to protect themselves, but stay open enough to ensure continued innovation?”. Listen or download here.

You can also download the independent report by Professor Ian Hargreaves titled “Digital Opportunity“, a review of Intellectual Property and Growth.

Several pertinent questions have been answered, under different heads -

• Copyright – Basic Facts
• Ownership and length of copyright
• Using copyright material
• Enforcing copyright

More information is available in the form of a booklet titled “The law of copyright and rights in performances” available from  The British Copyright Council.
Access the UK IPO’s copyright pdf here. You will find a list of publications on patents, designs, trademarks, and other aspects related to copyright.

Such a copyright is rather simplistically based on the notion that, in the event of misuse of intellectual property, the poor-man’s copyright could establish a “legally recognized date of possession before any proof which a third party may possess”. Poor man’s copyright is an ineffective way of protecting your work, though it is inexpensive.

The United Kingdom Patent Office has this to say on the subject – “… a copy could be deposited with a bank or solicitor. Alternatively, a creator could send himself or herself a copy by special delivery post (which gives a clear date stamp on the envelope), leaving the envelope unopened on its return. A number of private companies operate unofficial registers, but it would be sensible to check carefully what you will be paying for before choosing this route. It is important to note, that this does not prove that a work is original or created by you…”.

However, as per copyright law, there is no provision for extending any such type of protection. Poor man’s copyright is not a substitute for registration. Therefore, you will need the right copyright registration service to register copyright on any of your work, whether artistic, literary, or other creative output.

Copy protection systems are explained thus in this glossary – “Under new International agreements on intellectual property, legal protection is given to copy protection measures. For example, the use of encoding to prevent the use of a product in a certain country, or the encryption of a database to prevent its disclosure, is legally protected. If anyone attempts to reverse-engineer or modify the product to make it work in a way that the holder of the intellectual property rights did not intend, then that modification of the system is itself unlawful. This issue has come to a head recently over the decryption of Internet address databases that work with Internet filtering or blocking software, and with the development of free versions of DVD players for the Linux operating system”.

Look up more about the DRMs from the UK  Intellectual Property Office (IPO) - Copy protection measures (DRM’s)

In July 2010, the UK government invited the public to contribute ideas on reducing pointless regulation and unnecessary bureaucracy. The response consisted of 14,000 ideas. Look up the set of 53 ideas on copyright contributed by people like you.

When you want to share pictures (that you have clicked with some effort) on an online forum / group / site, you might want to establish ownership rights for those pictures, if only to deter interested parties from reusing them with not-quite-noble intent. The higher the resolution of your images, the more attractive they are – and that much more tempting it is for an interested viewer with or without mala fide intentions. 

One way to protect the images is to watermark your images online. One of the easiest methods is provided by PicMarkr. Another is available at WaterMarkTool. Yet another simple method is to simply insert or embed your preferred copyright information as plain text in the image file, using Photoshop or any other image editing program, like in the accompanying image. 

Learn how to watermark your pictures. Also read about Digital Watermarking.

See for example – Websitecop.co.uk’s advice on how to register your website contents with them. What this site claims to do is – act as an independent third party for you to date-stamp the contents of your site with them. Read more about this service.

A similar service is on offer elsewhere. Look up this Copyright Registration Service available at a certain fee.

The best tool against copyright infringement is of course knowledge. Know all about copyright from the UK’s Intellectual Property Office.