copyrighting

so... lets say i have something i want to copyright. like a song, for example. how would one go about doing this? and does it vary for different forms of medium?

The official website for the US Copyright Registration
http://www.gocopyright.com/

Nuke, that's not the official site, just a service that does middle-man stuff for you.

For the actual government run site, it's: http://www.copyright.gov/register/

There's also an FAQ somewhere on the site that tells you pretty much everything you could possibly want to know about what's considered public domain, what's considered copyright infrigement, etc.

ah, my mistake. I didnt really know much about copyrighting myself, but I figured I'd do a bit of research to help this guy out, and the site I found seemed the most viable.

Anything you create is automatically copyrighted to you, the problem arises if someone else claims it as their material. To avoid this you need to purchase an actual copyright as you would a patent.

yikes... $30 a pop? uh... in hindsight, maybe i wouldn't mind if people stole that... well, maybe one or two things i'd like two protect. but for a total of $90? that's a little much for me... i doubt anyone would want to steal it anyway. so i'll probably live.

i don't think $30 is really that steep. think about, say, really big corporations. paying $30 to copyright a book or something, not that bad. Though I guess the price is why really big corporations have lots of copyrights and students don't, heh.

anyhow, if it's something that's written: put it in an envelop. mail it to yourself. Don't open it. If someone were to try to steal it, the envelop would be court-worthy evidence, as it's considered a government document and would have a date on it.

Exactly. Same as art. You can put a photocopy, or the original, in an envelope.

yep. the cheap and easy way to get something copyprotected

What is it that you want to copyright, If there's some economical gains that can come from it then you may want to try and get a compony to copyright it for you for like 40% of the profits. Just make sure you record and documant all meetings and talks to make sure they don't try and cut and run with it