Lots of people make cookies with their grandmothers and eat dough from the bowl, despite the salmonella risk. Then again, if you get a copy of the other article and discover that the other author has misspelled salmonella in the exact same way you misspelled it, you may have a case. Anything that is not covered under copyright law, either because it doesn t qualify for protection or because it has fallen out of copyright, is in the public domain and may be copied without permission from the creator. For a more complete definition of public domain, click here . So your novel or poem or story is copyrighted automatically, and you re the only person allowed to reproduce, adapt, display, perform, or distribute to the public the bundle of rights to the work that are protected by copyright law with certain exceptions, of course.
Lawyers love exceptions.
A library is allowed to photocopy a damaged book. Certain nonprofit organizations are allowed to reproduce parts of your book sometimes without getting approval. You re allowed to transfer a single copy of computer software from the diskette or CD-ROM to your computer. There s something called fair use, which we ll discuss later. For most purposes, though, you re the only one.