Copyright gives the author or the publisher the legal ownership
rights to control production, sale and distribution of
particular documents or images.
Protecting your intellectual property is a vital part of
creating and selling your own digitally published works.
Registering your copyright establishes a public record of your
copyright worldwide.
An excellent resource on the subject can be found at Brad
Templetons site which I recommend as a must read by anyone
interested in protecting their work...
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
When you run an online business be aware of the copyright laws
in other countries and compare them with your own country's laws
and how they may also apply to you.
The information in government documents is usually not copyright
and available for use by everyone, but always check to be sure.
When you have created your e-book you do not want an
un-authorised party to illegally copy your work or claim it as
theirs.
Along with the other pirating proliferating on the net the
stealing of ebooks is growing at an alarming rate.
There have been many cases where authors have found their work
on other author's sites under the name of the other author. If
your work is copyrighted you can at least legally sue for
copyright infringement.
You can password protect your e-book and other documents to make
cyber piracy of your work more difficult, but PC's and the
document compiler software you use can never provide total
security against the determined cyber thief.
It is estimated that every year music, text and image files that
are worth an estimated $10 billion to their copyright owners are
illegally copied over the internet.
When this kind of theft occurs it can go on for quite some time
before you find out resulting in a loss fame, recognition and
sales revenue which should have been yours.
Copyright law covers most material on the Internet and extends
to text and images placed on another person's web site. If a
feature does not appear to have a copyright marker you should
still assume it is copyright and requires permission before
using.
Use the Meta tag element to embed copyright into your HTML
documents or web pages.
Similarly the authors name can be embedded in a Meta tag.
Copyright those documents before you find you are a victim with
no legal rights because you have failed to take the the simple
precautionary step of placing a copyright marker on your work.
