March 30, 2010 by Christine
It is part of my job to meet with prospective clients to find out about their business and come up with new ways for them to grow through the use of creative PR. Creativity is the key to a successful PR campaign and is something which I feel very strongly about. If there doesn’t seem to be an interesting angle I work hard to come up with something to excite and capture the attention of the public.
In the current climate, it is unfortunately all too easy for companies to believe that there is no budget – everybody can feel the pinch of the economic environment. There is only one way to release that pressure and that is to step up, do something different and make a positive change in your mindset for the good of your business.
It seems to be an age old problem in the PR world that time and effort can be wasted on proposals as you are freely giving ideas with little comeback on the ownership of same. In an unfair world, there is little to stop someone from saying that your ideas are in fact theirs – that is unless you copyright your work…
When this is the case, PR proposals and ideas legally become the intellectual property of the creator;
“The colloquial description of intellectual property is that it comprises all those things that emanate from the exercise of the human mind, such as ideas, inventions, poems, designs, music, etc. Intellectual property is therefore about creative ideas. Dissemination of these ideas benefits society and stimulates further creative activity.” (Irish Patents Office)
The moral of the story is to copyright your work and hope that you are dealing with honest people to respect your intellectual property.
Hi Christine,
Interesting post about intellectual property.
Copyright as a concept is often misunderstood, and interpreting copyright law can get complicated, but the basics are straightforward enough.
First of all there is no copyright on ideas. Copyright applies to the unique expression of those ideas.
Copyright exists whenever a piece of original work is created. I own the copyright to this comment, for example — the exact words I’m typing to express my thoughts, opinions and ideas — in much the same way as you own the copyright to the above post.
While I can’t copy your post and paste it into my own blog without violating your copyright in your original work, there’s absolutely nothing to prevent me from taking the same idea, and writing about it in my own words over on my blog, in a newspaper article or anywhere else.
You don’t actually need to do anything to copyright your work. Copyright exists as soon as a piece of original work is created — whether it’s the arrangement of words on a page, recording a song, moulding a sculpture, clicking the shutter. Once you create something original and unique you automatically own the copyright to that piece of work — that particular expression of your idea. Nobody else is legally allowed to reproduce it without your permission.
Copyright protects the particular expression of an idea… patents, from what I understand, protect inventions (or the physical manifestation of an idea) — but neither apply to the actual ideas themselves.
Moral of this story, I guess, is when you have a great idea, turn it into something tangible as soon as possible, because while it’s still floating around in your head there’s nothing to stop somebody else getting in first.
Comment by Calvin Jones — March 30, 2010 @ 3:39 pm
Here’s a decent explanation of copyright from the Copyright Association of Ireland:
http://www.cai.ie/faq/index.htm
Comment by Calvin Jones — March 30, 2010 @ 3:47 pm