I’ve been ‘discussing’ this with 
In the UK, we have the most stringent copyright laws in the world. Just the act of typing up these words on my computer this morning means they are copyright and no one has the right to copy them and use them for their own profit without permission from me. Whether that means I give the permission freely or for a charge is down to me. I created the sequence of words and by that act, this sequence is mine.
Proving it would have made me money is the thing though. Unless you’re famous, with a great background in earning from your wordsmith skills, you don’t have much of a chance against Joe Nobody who made a couple of hundred dollars by posting your work to sites and taking the credit. If someone famous like Dorothy la Fame took your story and fiddled with it a little (or not at all) and published, making thousands or millions of dollars from it and you can PROVE she stole your work, then the world is indeed your oyster – if you win the court case.
In America, there are businesses that take care of the copyrighting for writers. For a charge (of course) they will register the writer’s works, but if you look hard enough, you can do it yourself. The protection afforded by registering your work helps if you have to take a plagiarist to court for infringement. It doesn’t help with proving how much ‘damage’ you suffered and therefore, how much money you lost.
The money you ‘win’ in that court case all depends upon how much you’ve lost by the other’s theft. How much money would you have earned if you had published? Maybe a little more than Joe Nobody, but more than likely, a hell of a lot less than Dorothy la Fame.
In my opinion, the same goes for all aspects of creativity. I don’t believe MY work should benefit anyone else UNLESS they have asked for permission to use it and certainly NOT if they put their name to the work and take the credit for it. Or, if they just leave their name off and allow others to assume it’s theirs.
Do you think once a photograph or piece of music is out in the open, posted on the internet and discoverable, it should therefore pass into public domain, or do you believe the work and credit remains with the original author/creator long past the ‘death plus 70 years’ it is currently?
In my first book, I used the poem by Rudyard Kipling – Female of the Species. I credited him with the work of course, but I didn’t need to gain permission because of ‘fair use’ and the ‘death plus 70 years’ clause. Tolkein’s works are the only ones I know that have been contested in court and the rights belong to his descendants for longer than that term.
So, don’t use other artists/creatives work UNLESS you cite sources and give credit where credit is due.
That’s my opinion. What’s yours?
Images from Pixabay