Intellectual property issues can be confusing, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there. As an author, here are some basic concepts you should know about.
Copyright is the legal principle that is intended to prevent your book from being copied and distributed by another party. Your work is automatically protected by copyright once it’s printed or published online; however, that’s not going to necessarily prevent anyone from making and distributing unauthorized copies illegally. There’s some controversy right now about how best to deal with that problem. Some people feel it’s best to protect their work so that it can’t be copied under any circumstances, and there are some mechanisms, such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), to prevent digital information from being copied. Other people don’t think that’s a good way to go, because it prevents paying customers from keeping copies of the book on multiple devices or sharing the book with a friend—which means the author has just lost an opportunity to develop his or her fan base. But digital copyright infringement is a real issue, so it’s a dilemma.
Trademarks and service marks work a bit differently from copyright. Trademarks and service marks protect a product or a service. If you’re writing a series of books, for example, you may want to protect the series title with a service mark. You can also register and trademark the domain name for your book or for yourself as an author under certain circumstances. While a copyright protects the intellectual property you’ve created, a trademark or service mark is designed to protect the distinctive identity of your product or service.
So they protect different things, but as an author, you should think about both. Specifically, you should think about how and to what extent you want to protect your intellectual property in the digital world. A few years ago, in order to pirate a book, someone had to make physical copies and hand them out, which was a laborious process. Now it’s possible to click a few times and share hundreds of thousands of copies of a book instantly. Based on the struggles of the music industry in recent years, it’s easy to see that illegal file sharing is very, very difficult to prevent. Charging people by the file when it’s so easy to get a copy for free is a tough sell. At the same time, you want to avoid alienating your readers by placing too many restrictions on what they can do with a file once they’ve purchased it. One of the main issues facing the publishing industry today is how to monetize digital content. Some media companies are starting to talk about the possibility of streaming rather than selling digital files, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out in the publishing industry. There aren’t any perfect solutions, but as an author, this is an issue you should certainly be aware of.