6 Your Rights as an Author
Copyright grants an author of an original work the exclusive rights to:
- To reproduce the work in copies (e.g., through photocopying)
- To distribute copies of the work
- To prepare transitional or other derivative works
- To perform or display the work publicly
- To authorize others to exercise any of these rights
- To reuse your work in teaching, future publications, and in all scholarly and professional activities.
- To post your work on the web (sometimes referred to as “self-archiving”), in a disciplinary archive (such as PubMed Central or arXiv), or in an institutional repository (Iowa Research Online is UI’s institutional repository)
Copyright protection applies to any work that:
- Is an original work of authorship
- Involves some aspect of creative expression or analytical interpretation. Facts cannot be copyrighted.
- Fixed in a fixed, tangible form of expression, published or unpublished.
(From What is Copyright?, U.S. Copyright Office)
You own your copyright from the moment the work is created, and there is no need to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office. Registering a work, however, is required for certain publishing activities and can be helpful if you ever find yourself in a legal copyright dispute. Visit the U.S. Copyright Office’s website to find out more. You will own your copyright until 70 years after your death unless you transfer the rights to a publisher or other party.
There are some limits. Eventually, your copyright will expire and become part of the Public Domain. Your work may also be subject to Fair Use guidelines, allowing others to to use it in certain contexts. Finally, intellectual property created as part of a person’s job can be considered “work-for-hire,” and copyrightable by an author’s employer. The University’s Intellectual Property Policy provides more information about the types of works it considers work-for-hire.
