I Know What Work Is

Wikipedia provides a nice listing of the kinds of things that could be considered a "work," but, in general, we can think of a "work" as any singular composition, "finished" or not. This not only applies to written words, but to songs, photos, slideshows, drawings, etc.

Byte: If you live in one of the 166 ratifying countries of the Berne Convention of 1886, then you automatically own the copyright of whatever original works that you produce as soon as, in the words of Wikipedia, the "idea has been reduced to tangible form."

This means that you neither have to register your work with any authority nor put that little copyright logo next to your name at the bottom for it to be yours. Article 27, Section two, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author." The general idea is that, since our identity is in some way vitally connected to the manner in which we express our ideas (not a foreign concept for those of us teaching composition and rhetoric), when we compose a work, our manifestation of our idea is immediately ours. Implicit in this declaration is that there is a benefit to the promotion and dissemination of innovative, original ideas, and that the originators should have some exclusive right to them.

Byte: We can think of copyright not as restriction, but as freedom to express without fear of theft or fraud. If we want others to use our works freely, however, we have to explicitly permit them to.

This all seems pretty simple, and it kind of is, until we get into derivative works such as adaptations, commentary, parody, etc. And, of course, educational use of copyrighted material. To keep things as simple as possible, however, let's just focus on three basic categories of "works":

copyrighted works with all rights reserved,
copyrighted works that are explicitly licensed for certain kinds of use/modification, and
works that are in the public domain.

Let's briefly discuss each type.

Copyrighted Works with All Rights Reserved

The first of these is what your sad little poem is as soon as you scrawl it on a cocktail napkin. You retain full, exclusive rights to the publication, distribution, sale, and modification of the work until such time as you enter into a book contract or something. No registration or demarcation of copyright is required for the copyright to be owned, although anyone wanting to make sure that it's 100% clear that nobody can use the material without asking usually will do both so that they have evidence in case they want to enforce their copyright against alleged infringement. In the United States, the duration of the copyright is a bit complicated and depends on when the work was published. Let's keep it simple and just say that your poem, provided it was written on the cocktail napkin sometime after January 1, 1978, is totally yours until 70 years after your death. That's right.

Copyrighted Works that Are Explicitly Licensed for Certain Kinds of Use/Modification

The second type of work is one that explicitly states in what way the copyright holder is allowing the work to be used, shared, and modified, including any specific parameters. The most common standard sharing licenses are those developed by Creative Commons, which we will discuss in more detail soon. The parameters of use under these licenses last as long as the copyright does because the licenses are designed to operate within existing copyright code.

Works that Are in the Public Domain

When those 70 years have passed since your death (sorry to be morbid), the poem will be freed of its copyright and will pass into the public domain, whether you kept all rights reserved or licensed it for sharing (for some reason). The exceptions here are potentially many, as different countries have passed some different specific laws and, really, if you want to know if something is in the public domain, just use a calculator like Public Domain Sherpa. In the United States, most works published before January 1, 1923, are in the public domain.

Some things, like general concepts and ideas, can be considered in the public domain and, therefore, uncopyrightable. For example, you can't copyright the idea of a "thesis statement," but you can copyright your original, written description of a thesis statement. Works in the public domain are great resources for educators (and others) because they can be reproduced, modified, sold, etc., with no restriction whatsoever. Note, however, that while the text of a public domain work is free in this way, any specific reprinting, reformatting, etc., may be copyrighted by the publisher.

Let's move on, then, and see if we get these distinctions.