Copyright
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JC sounds off™ on Intellectual Property©
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Copyright
/ˈkɒpɪrʌɪt/ (n.)
A proprietary right that arises at law as a result of a human exercising her creative powers. Though of course laws are necessarily local and there is not yet, a Team America World Police to keep right thinking people on the straight and narrow worldwide, there is a curious amount of international harmony amongst legislators so the same rights accrue in most — not all — places. You don’t need to pay for it, register it or claim it: it just arises as a consequence of you being creative.
Though claiming it is probably sensible if you ever want to enforce your rights to it.
Examples
Investor presentation materials
These present:
- a low risk of copyright infringement (even if you do “breach copyright”, who is going to sue you and what would their loss be?)
- a fairly low risk of breach of confidence (I guess you might violate securities laws by distributing materials in certain places)
- a fairly low risk from a market abuse perspective (by its nature investor materials are designed as a pitch to outsiders – and in those IBD scenarios where it might not be, you would be confi’d up to kingdom come anyway.
FT and Bloomberg articles
Commercially published articles (also index outputs and so on) present:
- a real risk of copyright infringement: here the very business motivation for creating them is that people who read them will be prepared to pay for them
- a low risk of breach of confidence: By definition, this information is in the public domain – anyone who wants to pay for it can have it.