Re: 5-by-6 Block Format on Quilt is Copyrightable

Jane:

It sounds to me like your small business needs to hire a local copyright lawyer. It's fairly easy to protect commercial course material by registration...but you can't make assumptions that the materials in one format are automatically protected if they are transformed to another format. More importantly, you will probably be dealing with a lot of pre-existing material incorporated into your course materials, which were written by someone other than your company...therefore copyright permissions or licenses will also be needed.

  It's a good idea to self-educate on the issues and there are a lot of materials available at the Copyright Office website, www.loc.gov/copyright/, but I really think you should hire an attorney experienced in copyright issues to help you. You have specific legal questions requiring advising the company confidentially, and no one can really form a lawyer client relationship and advise you adequately on an open public mailing list.

Regards,

Carol Shepherd

Jane Carsrud wrote:
>
> ok it seems like the conversations here are a bit more advanced than I am
> ready to be. Hope you all wont mind if I ask a rather elementary question. I
> work for a small business that writes educational courses for nurses. We
> currently have 20 courses none of which are copyrighted. How do we go about
> copyrighting them? Also we are planning on putting these on the web and
> selling them in a .pdf format. If we copyright our web stuff is our hardcopy
> stuff automatically copyrighted? Is it expensive to get it going? where do I
> apply?
> Ok now that I have revealed my ignorance (thus my reason for subscribing)
> please dont flame me but I do need these questions answered.
> *listening*
> jcarsrud

-- 
Carol Ruth Shepherd 
Arborlaw Associates PLLC 
Ann Arbor, Michigan USA 
734 668 4646 v 734 822 4646 f 
509 692 4561 efax
http://www.arborlaw.com 
business, technology, entertainment 
and new media law