Sample Copyright Notices

A copyright notice is a short line of text that lets the public know that your work is protected by copyright law and is not to be copied.

These copyright notices are widely used and can be found all over, from websites and blogs, to films and music.

This article will further explain what a copyright notice is and some of the benefits that come with having one, while helping you create your own.

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Copyright refers to a branch of intellectual property law that aims to protect creations such as books, music and art.

When you create something new, copyright law automatically gives you full ownership rights in your creation.

For example, if you write a screenplay, novel, or even a blog post, you've just created something new. Once you put that creation out into the world and allow the public to access it, copyright law kicks in to help make sure that someone else can't steal a part of (or all of) your creation.

If someone does do something to violate your copyright, like copy your blog post and attribute it to himself, or try to claim authorship of your screenplay, copyright law makes it possible for you to enforce your rights against the other and maintain your ownership.

Here's an example of a standard copyright notice in place in the footer of Sephora's website:

No, you do not need to register your copyright.

While it's not required to register your copyright, registering comes with some benefits that make the time and fee worth spending.

Perhaps the biggest benefit by far is that you'll have the ability to bring a lawsuit against someone who infringes your copyright if you've registered your copyright.

While it's not unheard of to wait until someone infringes your rights to register your copyright and bring suit, you'll have a much stronger case if you can show that your copyright has been registered for a longer period of time.

For more information on U.S. Copyright registration, visit here. In the EU, you can find information and resources here.

While copyright notices aren't required by any law, they're incredibly helpful to people who wish to legally protect their work.

Basically, anything that you create and share with the public but still keep the public from copying or appropriating in full or in part would benefit from having a copyright notice.

Here are a few of the benefits of having a copyright notice in place of your work:

In the event that you need to bring legal action against someone for copying your work, having a copyright notice in place can be a very useful thing.

Showing the court that you had a copyright notice up may help you support your case against infringers by making it easier for you to prove that the alleged infringer knew, or was put on notice, that your work was copyrighted.

Note, however, that due to the complex nature of copyright law, it hasn't been proven in court that a copyright notice will make an absolute difference in your case given all of the other potential factors involved in copyright infringement.

Each copyright notice should include 4 main components:

A statement of rights

A statement of rights is not a requirement. By default, a copyright notice will work to reserve all of your rights, so stating something like "All Rights Reserved" isn't technically necessary.

However, it is commonly seen this way and clarity of your rights can't hurt.

The universally accepted symbol for a copyright is the letter C in a circle: 漏

You can also use the word "copyright."

This symbol or word should be placed at the beginning of your copyright notice:

For the copyright date, you'll want to use only a year or years. Months or days are not used.

The year you'll use will be the year of publication, or, in other words, the year your work gets released into the public in a way that copyright law would matter.

If you create a website and only share it with your close friends, you won't need a copyright, but if you make it at all accessible to the general public, you do, and the date should be the year you make it accessible.

If you keep a mix of old and new content in your copyrighted medium, your copyright date may be a range rather than a single year.

Say, for example, you create a website and the overall content is from 2015 and unchanged. You also may have a blog post or image from an earlier year that you keep up on your website. Your copyright date will be 2015 - "current year."

The Amazon website uses content that originated back in 1996 along side constantly-updated and new material, so its website copyright date has the range of 1996 to 2021:

However, when emails are sent out, they only have one date: the year they're sent during. That's because the email itself and the information in it is put together and sent out in that year:

Depending on the nature of your material, your date can be a range or a single year.

The copyright author's name can be the name of an individual, multiple individuals, an organization's name, or a business/corporate name, so long as it identifies who holds the copyright on the material.

This helps people identify you or your business and shows clear and specific ownership of the material:

The "statement of rights" is where you can let people know what rights you're holding onto with your copyright.

There are 3 main types of rights most copyright notices will maintain:

All Rights Reserved. You keep all rights to your material.

This is by far the most commonly used and seen statement of rights in copyrighted materials.

Some Rights Reserved. Seen in Creative Commons licensing.

You may allow use of your materials under certain circumstances, like only with full attribute to you, and no alteration can be done to your original material.

Stock photos are a common example of this reservation of rights.

No Rights Reserved. Sometimes you'll want to declare ownership of something, but not make that restrictive for the rest of the world.

Interestingly, the famous "I