Content and copyright

What copyright actually covers.

Copyright arises automatically in the UK. There is no register, no certificate and no filing, which sounds convenient until the day somebody asks you to prove the work was yours. What protects you at that point is not the right itself. It is the record you kept of making it.

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What this looks like when it goes wrong

The commonest version is somebody discovering that the thing they wanted to protect was never protected in the first place. A name, a title, a slogan or a short phrase is ordinarily too slight to carry a copyright of its own, and the person who assumed otherwise has spent money building the wrong argument.

The second is an idea taken and reworked. A concept was pitched, discussed and then executed by somebody else in a different form. Copyright protects the way something is expressed rather than the thought behind it, so the answer turns on how much of the actual material was reproduced. Where the idea itself was the valuable thing, protection has to come from confidence and contract, and both of those have to exist before the pitch rather than after it.

The third is a right that plainly exists and cannot be shown. The work is genuinely yours. The files have moved between laptops and agencies, the person who made it left years ago, the drafts were never kept and the original account was closed. Nothing has been lost as a matter of law. Everything has been lost as a matter of evidence, and from the other side those two things look identical.

The fourth is a claim brought against material that never attracted copyright at all. Data, facts, a collection of information or a method of doing something can be valuable and still sit outside copyright, or inside a different right with different conditions and a different owner. Establishing which it is comes first, because it decides whether there is anything to bring.

What actually decides it

Copyright protects expression, not the underlying idea, information or method. Somebody who produces something similar without ever having seen your work does not infringe, because copyright is infringed by copying rather than by resemblance. What has to be shown is that their material derives from yours and that what was taken amounts to a substantial part, which is judged by importance rather than by quantity.

Because there is no register, ownership is proved from records. Dated files, drafts and version history, briefs and correspondence, invoices, credits, and the contracts under which people worked. Where more than one person contributed, the position may be joint, and joint ownership carries consequences for what any single owner can do alone. Where a work was made by an employee in the course of employment, the default ordinarily differs from work made by a contractor, which is why the status of whoever actually made it matters more than who paid the invoice.

One item usually carries more than one right, and those rights can be held by different people. A film, a recording, a website, a photograph inside a brochure and the material around it can each attract separate protection with separate owners. How long each lasts is fixed by statute and differs according to the kind of work involved, so the answer for a recording is not the answer for the thing that was recorded.

There are also rights that stay with the author personally, concerning attribution and objectionable treatment of the work. Whether those rights arise for a given work, whether they have been asserted, and what effect any waiver or contractual term has on them, depends on the circumstances and on the drafting, and it is an area to check rather than assume. It matters most where a contributor wants credit rather than money, because that is not something an assignment of copyright necessarily settles.

What we do

Establish what is actually protected

Separating the material that carries a right from the material that does not, before anybody spends money on a claim.

Build the ownership record

Assembling the evidence that proves the work is yours, from the files, the contracts and the people who made it.

Find the breaks in the chain

Where a work passed through employees, contractors and agencies, identifying what was never actually transferred.

Fix the position going forward

Contracts, credits and record keeping set up so the next piece of work does not repeat the same problem.

Test a claim before it is made

Whether what was taken is capable of being a substantial part, and whether the case is worth running at all.

Answer a claim against you

Where somebody says your material is theirs, establishing what they actually hold and what they can prove.

When to spend nothing

If what you want to protect is a name, a short phrase or an idea, a copyright claim is usually the wrong instrument, and sending one mostly advertises that the position is weak. The better spend is on registering whatever can be registered, because that turns an argument about evidence into a question of what appears on a register.

There is also a large category of copying that is real, unauthorised and not worth pursuing. A small reproduction that is not competing with you, not making money and not confusing anybody costs more in attention than it takes from you. What is always worth doing, and costs nothing beyond discipline, is keeping the records for the work that matters, because that is the part nobody can manufacture afterwards.