Library of Congress Copyright

For the serious, devoted artist or writer, The Library of Congress Copyright will be the hiking hook and safety rope necessary to climb the mountain that is the internet. That is, if you are a musician, an artist who crafts fractal art, a writer, or anyone who has work on display online, you will want to use The Library of Congress Copyright informational guidelines, forms for application, and reference pages wherein the laws of copyright are established and defined.

In the same respect, if you are a website owner, domain master, webmaster, web mistress, or entrepreneur hoping to scam some free web content (that is not intended as FREE web content), if you expect to lift a photo or image wherever you feel you wish to enhance your site, or if you intend to replicate the exact wording of any page in existence, please know that you are in violation of the Library of Congress Copyright laws, and will sorely suffer in one of many ways.

It is tempting for some to ignore The Library of Congress Copyright laws, those individuals not understanding, appreciating, or caring about copyright laws or copyright-protected material. Stealing songs is cool, poaching pics is harmless, and wrangling for words already strung together is righteous for these poor fools. But imagine you are the one who has spent twenty-five hours crafting materials for your own site, and someone in Hullabaloo comes along, copies and pastes, and publishes YOUR work, and continues happily, collecting money for all the “hits” he or she gets from his or her site. You would likely cry out, “Hey! That’s MY work! My kids are suffering because you have stolen money from them by using their papa’s work or their mama’s art!”
Regardless of the weak analogy, the hypothetical attempts to get you thinking about who you are stealing from, we have laws that remind you stealing is wrong (if the concept is too tasking on your thieving brain). Intellectual rip-off is the equivalent of corner-store robbery. It is not yours. Put it back. Get your own.

Hence, unfortunately, the need for the complexities and coverage of The Library of Congress Copyright laws. And with regards to world wide web intellectual property—which is what any creative piece is considered—it is a relatively new division of The Library of Congress Copyright laws, as the internet has been made more available to the public in only the last two decades or so. But it is as rigorous as the earlier copyright laws, if not more so.

And some who are less than honest but more foolish will think that they can’t be “caught.” Au contraire. For those of us who do our own creative work AND our own research, we can find you by many means—by way of a tool called COPYSCAPE (which is just one of many such tools), by way of domain name and address/phone number searches through such engines as whois.com), and by way of the same tool you use to lift stuff that aint yours: the internet search engines.

And if you know anything about government (in the US or UK, especially), you will have to tell yourself that you can be found as easily as you can be found out.

I don’t propose that all you who read this are the you whom I address at times here. I just spread the word for many of the yous and theys who are sick of, angered by, tired of, and damaged by intellectual property theft.

If you are one of the latter, you can get protection (for as little as 35 bucks) by Library of Congress Copyright laws and other copyright bastions, and if you are one of the former or one who is CONSIDERING the lazy copy/paste activity I see so many places on the net (as I read and research, besides write, for a living—16 hours a day), you will likely benefit from visiting one of the following sources for copyright information, support, and help:

AuthorsLawyer.com – Includes copyright management tools, copyright sources, scam info, and more….

NetEnforcers.com – offers services to educate and protect you….

Whatiscopyright.org – a q and a that covers definitions and distinctions (between, say, patents and copyrights)….

FURL (furl.net) – to furl your site to check for copy thieves

Brint.com (http://www.brint.com/IntellP.htm) – pages on Intellectual Property Law and Technology: Copyrights, Trademarks, and Patents….

LawGirl Says…( http://www.lawgirl.com/webcopyright.shtml) – a discussion of copyright protection for websites….

Copyscape.com – another furling site to catch em.

The US Copyright Office (copyright.gov) – everything about copyright and services for registering/copyrighting your work in the U. S.

Best of luck and creativity to all!