What are copyrights and patents?
You see copyright dates in every book and on every other published work, and many products carry the patent symbol somewhere on their packaging. You also hear about copyrights and patents when there are questions about who owns the rights to a certain work or product. The United States government maintains copyright and patent programs to ensure everybody is able to profit from their original creative works. Of course, financial profit isn’t the only reason to copyright or patent something: The programs are simply meant to give a creator legal control over when, where and how his or her creation is published or used in the United States. U.S. protection is extremely broad — most kinds of creative work are copyrightable — but it’s also fairly amorphous, full of subjective interpretations and legal details. The broadest creative-work protection the U.S. government offers is the copyright. Something that is copyrighted may not be reproduced, published or copied without permission from t