Copyright Your Critical Documents

Do you have any critical documents that you use as part of your business that you have spent time and money on and that you do not want your competitors using? You customers, former employees, vendors and others with access to your paperwork are often more than willing to share your documents.

In home building we had construction plans and specifications. We made sure we owned the copyright and not the architect who we hired to prepare them. We also had a Homeowners Manual that we spent a lot of time and money preparing. Other documents can be sales documents, contracts, marketing material, advertising, maintenance instructions, catalogs, pricing sheet or any other original document you would not like copied.

Establishing a copyright can be as easy as adding the symbol © and the owner of the copyright and date.  This gives you the rights but they may be difficult to defend. To give you more protection on documents, consider registering them with the US Copyright office http://www.copyright.gov/.

Make a list of original documents you use. Add your copyright to the documents and consider registering the most critical ones.

All original content ©Thomas Robinson 2010