Which area of jurisdiction applies

For infringements of copyright the jurisdiction of the community host country and community ownership country applies. As WritersCo is hosted in Sweden and ownership held in the UK, jurisdiction regarding copyright infringement will be settled by these courts. As both countries are signatories of the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention the same laws apply.

Copyrights Concerned with Written Material

In the United Kingdom, virtually every work created by the labour, skill and judgement of an individual or institution is covered by copyright law as long as it meets the following pre-requisites:

1. The work must be original.
2. The work must be in a material form. Ideas cannot be copyrighted, but the expression of those ideas into a physical format will gain copyright. 

Copyright in any work that you have created (apart from that whilst employed - subject to contract) is automatic as long as you meet the above specifications. You do not have to register the work (as there is no agency to do so), pay a fee or undergo any type of bureaucratic process. You do not even have to attach the internationally recognised Copyright symbol (©). However if you wish to add the symbol you can do so, to remind others that your work is indeed protected by copyright law.

A typical copyright statement might look like:
© 2005 Named Person All rights reserved

Because there is no bureaucratic process to prove that you are the copyright owner it can sometimes be difficult to prove ownership. However in extreme cases, there are ways of proving that your work existed at a particular point in time.
To do this, you could deposit the work, within a bank or have a solicitor safe guard it. The second option is to send a copy to yourself with a valid date post mark via registered post. Of course you should leave the envelope unopened!

Copyrights last for 70 years after the end of the calendar year in which an author dies.



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