In today's high-tech age, images and designs can be developed in minutes and nearly everyone, it seems, is into desktop publishing. Look Say you want to make up a brochure for your business. You may know little about design or publishing, but you've invested in a good computer, desktop publishing software and a scanner. You figure you'll write up a few things and make them look pretty. You see a drawing in a magazine you decide will look great in your advertising circular or newsletter, so you scan it and revise it a bit.
Trouble is, that work is technically stolen property.
Under the law, you can't copy a copyrighted work, a portion of it, or create a similar duplicate. Some things aren't copyrightable. Fonts and typefaces, for instance, and geometric shapes, colors and patterns. Copyright is automatic when the work is created and fixed in a copy or recorded for the first time. Copyright protects the particular way something has been tangibly expressed, but not the idea, system or factual information itself.