Do you have to actually have it copyrighted to use the logo???
No, it is copyrighted from the moment of creation in "fixed medium." You MUST use the symbol on all published copies or risk putting the item into the public domain (at least on printed copies), but I don't think you HAVE to display it in the title bar to retain it -- it just puts people on notice so they can't say they didn't know.
You would have to register it before you could file a claim/collect damages for infringement.
Practically any thing you need is at the US Copyright Office, and more useful info is published by Nolo Press (may be available at your library).
I'm assuming here you want to enter the copyright info into the FileInfo field and such ....
You MUST use the symbol on all published copies or risk putting the item into the public domain (at least on printed copies)
I don't want to be argumentative, but it is NOT necessary to have the symbol on printed copies; you retain the creation copyright regardless of the symbol. Take a look at any magazine and tell me how many symbols you see on the pictures -- virtually none. The General is absolutely right, though, about having to register the image if you want to have a chance of collecting damages.
Jak is right. You can OFFICIALLY copyright any work of art or a manuscript by paying a fee to the copyright office, but this is done quite rarely for things like we're doing here. There is an assumed copyright with any work of art created. In court, all you have to do is show evidence that you created the work before someone else did.
One trick that playwrights use is to make a copy of your work in question, and then mail it to yourself--but don't open it when you get it back. It will then have a postmark on it, with a date! If there is ever a question, you simply open the envelope in court! But even this is unnecessary. Here on DPC, we've all seen the work, and it has dates all over it.
You MUST use the symbol on all published copies or risk putting the item into the public domain (at least on printed copies)
I don't want to be argumentative, but it is NOT necessary to have the symbol on printed copies; you retain the creation copyright regardless of the symbol. Take a look at any magazine and tell me how many symbols you see on the pictures -- virtually none.
That's because there is a copyright notice on the entire magazine covering all contents, just like we have an overall notice on the bottom of our pages, but not overlaid on each photo displayed.
If you take your image, print up a bunch of postcards without a notice on them and sell/distribute them, you likely WILL have put that (version of anyway) the image into the public domain. Even then, you can probably get it back by filing for a "correctable error" but it's better to just put the notice on everything.
In one of the other threads about copyright I posted some of the actual text from the Copyright Office's documents covering this subject, but I don't want to hunt for it right now -- I'm trying to figure out which are my worst ten photos for the other thread instead ....
That's the Macintosh code for the Circle-C symbol -- never heard of that working on Windows. Another easy way to get it is to use your system utilities: Character Map (Windows) or KeyCaps (Mac) to find any character you want, and then copy/paste from there.
