Copyright and Your Rights

Warning: some bad language has inexplicably sneaked into this post.
Yesterday in the blogosphere, word got around that a French site, operating out of this Blogspot address, which has been removed, was selling handbag tutorial pdfs for 1 Euro. The trouble was that the patterns were free tutorials put up by people like Made by Rae and Lisa Lam of U-Handbag here in the UK.  (BTW, they are both really lovely ladies who put a lot of 'free' out there for us yokels.)

So the French site had translated the English instructions, and claimed to have 'tested' them and 'written in extra directions where the originals were lacking.'  Hmmm. After a Facebook and blog mini-campaign exposing the infringement, the blog has been removed.
Now, you may or may not be disgusted by the French site's actions. One comment on Rae's blog implied she was the neighbourhood bully and had thwarted a whole people's right to read her tute in their native language. (Bullshit, they can use Google Translate like the rest of us.)
But bully or not, what the French blog had done was clearly a case for copyright infringement. Oh, I hear you, but it was in France so the rules are different, right?
Wrong. I looked into it, after being scolded by Buzz for not using © on my stuff, including my tutorials. Oops.
This is how copyright works:

• Copyright applies to any medium - so if someone writes something in a web site, you can't put it in your book and claim it's yours.
• Copyright doesn't apply to ideas - only finished work. It also applies to photos, unless you're silly enough to put your product photos on Facebook, and then it belongs to them. Assholes. Yet another reason fb infuriates me.
• Written copyright lasts for 70 years in the UK.
• Also, the UK belongs to a group of countries who signed the Berne Convention. Most countries in Europe, North America, Australia and even Russia belong to the Berne Convention. This means that something you copyright in America is still considered copyrighted in France, Russia, the UK - basically anywhere. And vice versa - original UK work is (nearly) worldwide copyrighted.
• America does have a system of registering your copyrighted stuff, but you don't actually need to register to have your work covered by copyright.
• In the UK, you don't even have to use the © symbol to have your work considered to be copyrighted, but they recommend you put it in there to avoid any confusion. But in some countries, the © symbol isn't enough, so to cover that, write the word 'copyright' next to the © symbol.
• To use the © symbol in Blogger, go into the 'Edit HTML' thing and write this where you want the symbol to go: © which will put that little symbol in for you. (Ampersand c o p y semi-colon)
• Here's what it should look like:

                                                                 © Copyright, J C Excell, 2011

• You might choose to put other phrases with it, like 'All Rights Reserved' or 'Any unauthorised broadcasting, public performance, copying or re-recording will constitute an infringement of copyright.' See this page for more info.

Now you may be thinking that this doesn't apply to you. But what if you put up a tutorial that you created yourself, and someone writing a craft book stumbles on it. They only have 3 days to come up with 20 more tutorials for their craft book. Yours looks perfect. They take it, even your pictures, and publish it as their own. How do you feel? Or someone's selling your tutorial on etsy and making money off of your work.
But let's say you've got this © symbol at the top of every tutorial. Now the person knows you take your copyright very seriously. Is it worth his/her time to chance pissing someone off who might be able to sue them? Probably not, and they move on.

You can find the UK's Intellectual Property Office here.
Also I'd like to say that I'm not a lawyer, just a nosy blogger.

© J C Excell, 2011
All Rights Reserved