[MUSIC] Now that we've covered the basics of patents, lets talk about copyrights. Looking at this slide, you probably notice a familiar symbol, which is the circled C in the title. This is the symbol used to designate copyrighted works. Copyrights are the legal rights of an author or a creator of an original expression in a tangible medium. It allows the author to have the sole rights to distribute his or her work or to assign those rights of work to another if they would like. One way to think about copyrights is they're used to protect the form of expression of an original work. Most commonly, copyrights are utilized in the protection of authorship, such as music and writing. Copyright grants gives authors the exclusive right to utilize their original works. This is obviously a very powerful tool for protection and might be helpful to you depending on the type of business you are starting. Specifically, the law allows the holder to use, reproduce, publicly perform, and publicly display the work. It also allows for distribution of copies and to prepare derivative works. Now that we have more clearly defined the types of works that can be copyrighted, let's talk about a few other details. Unlike patents, which only provide protection if the IP is granted a registered patent, copyrights are protected by common law, meaning that original works do not have to be registered with the governmental office to provide protection. But in the US, you may choose to register at copyright.gov, which is a department in the Library of Congress. Another misconception related to copyrights is that a lot of people believe that the circle C copyright notice is required to be next to a work to provide protection. In fact, this is not true. Your work is your work regardless of notice. But it's often beneficial to utilize this symbol, followed by the date and owner's name, as it provides notice to any plagiarizing party that you're likely to be proactively protecting your work. Another very interesting thing about copyrights is they have a very long protection period, as the work is protected for the author's life span plus an additional 70 years. And works created by an employee for their employer, and on specifically commissioned works, are protected for the shorter of either 95 years, from first publication, or 120 years from creation. Depending on the type of business and materials you create, you may or may not find it very useful to actively protect your original authorship. But for those of you looking to capitalize in your creative talents, this would be a powerful tool for you to utilize. Now let's move on to the last IP protection topic, which is trademarks. [MUSIC]