Hi. Me again.

Just one quick question: how do I go about getting an intellectual copyright? I've done a bit of research, but most of it tells me what they are rather than how to get one. Help? Please?

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"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
--Sir Winston Churchill

You sure this is the right thread? Unless you mean for a story...

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"Yee's proposal is exactly the sort of thing I would expect some Washington legal eagle to do. In fact, it could even be argued it would be unrealistic to not have a scene in the next book of, say, a Congressman Yee submit the Yee Act for consideration. " - bcoogler on this

"My crystal ball is filled with smoke, and my hovercraft is full of eels." - Bayonet

Stark: "You can't even GET to heaven. You don't even know where it is, or even if it still exists."
SirNitram: "So storm Hell." - From the legendary thread

Under US Copyright law, anything is automatically copyrighted by you as soon as it is "fixed in a permanent medium", which is a very broad definition which includes napkin scribblings, back-of-the-envelope calculations, paper-and-pencil, pastel paintings, when your computer writes a document to the hard drive when you hit the save command, pictures your camera saves, video recordings -- hell, maybe even chalk-on-sidewalk impressions.

Ideally, this is enough to hold up in court against someone else, provided you can show that you did it before them and they copied you. You can gain a lot more weight, however, by registering your copyright with the US Copyright office. This puts it in the government's records, not just your own.

Assuming you are in the US. I am certainly not familiar with non-US law, though I think most countries are going to be similar.

Disclaimer: IANAL, I only took a business law class.

You can also register them with the Library of Congress, IIRC.

Thanks, you guys. I think that's all I'll need for now.

I've been meaning to ask: whats ||RC?

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"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
--Sir Winston Churchill

IIRC is a common internet abbreviation for If I Recall Correctly.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956