Copyright registration

Any type of literary, artistic, dramatic,musical or design work. Examples include; documents, music, web sites, software, designs, logos, artwork, illustrations, paintings, photographs, scripts, books, manuscripts, poems, films, plays and TV programmes, and many, many more.

Yes. Some copyright owners will prefer their solicitor, publisher, recording company or agent to deal with copyright registration for them. It is quite common, particularly among solicitors, for an individual or company to act as authorised agent and register work on someone else’s behalf.

If you are acting as authorised agent, there are two ways that application forms can be completed depending on whether you wish the account holder to be you or the copyright owner.
Please see our page "acting as authorised agent" for details on how to proceed.

Names are not copyright items in their own right.
We will however accept registrations of items such as logos, which combine names with artistic/design elements, as these may be regarded as artistic or design works which are covered by copyright. This also provides evidence to say that you were there first, which may be of some benefit in defending your right to a trading name. You should also consider registering any commercially valuable documents you create under that name, (leaflets, flyers, advertisements, etc).

It may also be possible to protect a company name and mark as a trademark.

For more information on this subject, please also see the page dealing with names, titles and copyright.

No, the registration covers the work that is submitted with the application, it is not possible to provide evidence for items not yet created, as copyright does not exists until the work is in a tangible form (i.e. recorded or written down). You must therefore include all items that you wish to be covered in your submission.

If you are an employee and have produced the work during the course of your employment, then the company you work for will normally hold copyright on that work, you will have no personal claim to the work, (unless a written assignment of copyright has been agreed to the contrary).

It is however worth checking that the company has the work registered for its own benefit.

A sole trader is a private individual who runs a private business in his own right. Unlike an incorporated company (which can hold assets in its own right), being a sole trader means that legally you are the business. This means that you are personally the copyright owner, and your name should be registered as the owner of the work.

There is of course nothing wrong with clarifying the business aspect of the project, so if you want to include the trading name, this is perfectly fine. For example: “Ben Smith T/A ‘ACME Import’”

No, we require a full copy of the work. The registration covers items submitted with your application, it cannot provide protection for work not included at the time of registration.

No, registration is optional, but does have benefits: By registering you ensure that there is a verifiable record of the content of your work as it existed at that point in time. This can be valuable evidence if your ever need to prove your copyright claim (i.e. in an plagiarism case).

The copyright notice itself is a statement of ownership and intent, it is not part of the work itself. In fact the work is still subject to copyright even without a notice.

It does not matter if you include a copyright notice on the copy that you send for registration, as this copy is store confidentially and only exists to prove the date and content of your work.

We do however recommend that, wherever possible, you place a notice on any copies of your work that you make available to others. Please see our fact sheet P-03: Using copyright notices for further guidance.

Posting to yourself is better than nothing, but is very poor evidence as it is so easy to falsify the contents. More...

There are two reasons for this. Firstly a fair part of our work happens at the start of the registration, so although there would be some reduction in ongoing management/maintenance costs, a shorter registration period would not be as cost effective for our clients.

More importantly, before any infringement case is pursued, we would expect suitable time to elapse to allow the infringement to happen, be discovered by the copyright owner, and reasonable negotiation to have failed. This all takes time and means that shorter registration periods would have limited benefit.

It typically takes some time to exploit the potential of a work, and a shorter period would typically not give the creator of the work enough time.

For clients who require longer term or ongoing cover, renewal and longer registration periods (our 10 year option) are more appropriate.

Copyright is a long term right and will continue to exist, long after the author dies. To support this, as each registration nears the end, we offer the option to extended the cover for a further period.

No. We have strict rules governing the storage of client data and treat all details as confidential.

We believe that enabling data to be publicly searchable is inappropriate, potentially harmful, and would not serve the best interests of clients for several reasons:

• It may reveal information to a copyright infringer that could help them defend themselves against legal action.
• Many works are registered prior to publication. In some industry sectors a public search could be used to preempt product launches or inform competitors about activities that are taking place.
• Publicly searchable records are commonly used by companies to harvest names and addresses for unsolicited marketing campaigns.
   

For these, and other security reasons, our policy is that we will never divulge information about a registered work to any other party unless it is with the client's express instruction.

If you have registered work with us, then you can be assured that if we receive an enquiry, the most we do without your consent is confirm that a registration number is valid. Anything other than this would require your written instruction - that way you know what information has been provided and to whom.