It’s important to have an understanding of copyright if you are a business owner – for a few reasons;

- To avoid accidentally infringing other peoples copyright and being at the receiving end of a lawsuit.
- To understand in what ways copyright is relevant in your own business; what are you copyright owner of?

Registering Copyright
In the UK there isn’t an official registration procedure or place to register your copyright ownership, as copyright is an unregistered right requiring no official action to effect.

Copyright comes into effect immediately as soon as something is created, and whilst registering your ownership isn’t necessary it’s a good idea to mark your work with a copyright symbol ©.

What Can You Copyright?
The types of works protected by Copyright law include; original literary works such as novels, manuals, lyrics, original dramatic works, original musical works, and original works of art such as painting, engravings, photographs, sculptures and so on.

Any design work you commission and pay for as a client of Truly Ace is protected by Copyright – we pass our Copyright ownership of the original works onto you on receipt of payment for your project, and advise this in our terms and conditions at the time of your quotation.

Your Rights
As a Copyright owner you have a right to control the use of your original designs, and your rights commence as soon as the designs are recorded (including digitally), and you have paid for us to pass the Copyright over to you.

You will have a right to control any copying, adapting, distributing, or communication of your designs.

Protecting Your Copyright
Whilst it’s unlikely you will ever have to prove your copyright in a court of law one way of evidencing you are the owner of a piece of original work in terms of visual works such as graphic design, and logo design for instance, there is a simple method you can use:

Simply evidence the date that you became the copyright owner of your commissioned design by either saving it to disk, or print out (or ideally both) your design/s and post them to yourself.

This gives you a good measure of proof – provided you do not open the envelope (very important) – of the date that you became the owner of a certain artistic material.

Further Guidance >>

Have you been a victim of copyright theft? How did you deal with it?

I’ve been a victim of it several times now, and it’s fairly easy to deal with in most cases.