Why You Ought to Copyright Things You Make

If you’re reading this, I think you might be an artist of some kind of genre. It doesn’t really matter which one you represet, either you are a musician, artist, actor, architector or anything else the simple rule I’m going to say is appropriate for everyone.

The little experience, I’ve recently had, persuaded me to write this. I was asked to write an article for a local newspaper about one international project. The task wasn’t really difficult since I was the member of that project so I knew all about it. I wrote the article and applied sent it for the editor to check whether it’s appropriate for printing or not. It was approved and printed out on the magazine. I’ve seen and read it and what was nice is that the article itself wasn’t really changed or shortened or anything else was done for it. Only for the authors name. It turned out that I actually just forgot to write my name as an author. So the editor wrote his own name above the article. I’m sure you can get the idea how it pissed me off. Of course, I was angry about that: I not only worked for free, done everything as a favour, but also could see other persons’ name next to the article. So the editor actually earned money for work I’ve done!

There was nothing I could do about this – the magazine couldn’t be re-printed. This is the mistake I would like you not to repeat: you should always identify your creations as yours’! Don’t let anyone to use your content as their own, since it can not only really upset you for the rest of the day or even more but also prevent you from making money.