Patent Attorney and Founder
Hi everyone, I’m J.D. Houvener, your host of the Bold Today Show. We’re here for the inventor, entrepreneur, business owner, getting your daily dose of inspiration to make the world a better place.
Today, we’re still on part three of a ten-part series talking about the FIFA World Cup, which this year in 2018 is going on right now. If you didn’t know that, hop on TV, check out the game. It’s exciting. Soccer is a really fun sport. I played it when I was a kid, still playing recreationally today. I just encourage you to go check it out if you never watch soccer at a professional level. It is quite amazing. These athletes are doing a lot of different things more than you would normally think, meeting the eye in such a sport like this.
Today, we’re talking about the series here. We’re looking at the different parts of intellectual property in the setting of the FIFA World Cup. So we talked about trademarks yesterday, you know, common names out there today, Adidas, FIFA itself, some of the countries have specific logos, all the different emblems and badges that go along with representing a company. And believe it or not, sports teams are companies.
So today, we’re gonna shift gears and look at copyrights. The basis for copyright law, at least in the U.S., is to reward artists. Artists come in lots of different fashions, whether it be singing, performing arts, visual arts, or sculpting, and certainly computer science in terms of writing code and authors writing books. So a lot of different areas where copyright protection comes into play.
The rule of thumb is when you should seek copyright registration through the Library of Congress is when that work has taken roughly ten or more hours. But the biggest factor that I like to tell my clients is that they really don’t need to seek registration unless they’re gonna start publishing it. Publishing it or selling it to the open market is when it’s most vulnerable for unauthorized reproduction or copying without your permission. So that’s when you want to file it, work with an attorney to make sure that is done before filing.
The whole idea of copyright registration is to provide prima facie evidence that you are the author, it is exactly what you’re saying it is, and it was filed on this date. It’s just an official document that states exactly that. So the February needed to enforce your copyright on an infringer, you would have that already in place. So a judge wouldn’t have to assemble all that evidence, and you wouldn’t have to prove that you actually are the original author of that work.
In the sense of FIFA World Cup, there’s an enormous body of work. Every single image that you see captured in a photo, the video footage, the replays, down to the design work on the actual uniforms, looking at the different music that’s played into the commercials, all that is captured under copyright law. So everything you watch on TV is protected under copyright law.
It’s interesting to think about who created that image, you know, that must have been a lot of work that went into putting together those graphical user interfaces on your iPhones or your Samsung iPad or whoever it is on your TV that shows the scores. Little simple things like that, just having a nice image that captures what period it is, how much time is left, there are specific designs that are protected too under copyright law for each of those. So think about that in terms of the World Cup and then try to apply that towards what you’re working on in your own business and think about how you may be able to protect and should be protecting your copyrights.
I’m your host J.D. Houvener of the Bold Today Show. Have a good day, everybody. Go big, go bold.