People often discuss copyright and how it applies to material on this site. I am not a lawyer, but in business and privately I have had to deal with copyright issues, so I thought it might be helpful to give my understanding of copyright.

Again, what I say cannot be held as the final legal situation, but I will do my best not to mislead.

Firstly, here is a source that gives the legal definiton of copyright. It is quite understandable, even to the lay person!

UK Copyright Law fact sheet from UK Copyright Service.

In discussing copyright with people. I feel that most people confuse a couple of issues that need separating out. The greatest evidence of this confusion is apparent when someone says "Have you copyrighted that?".

Remember this: when you write a poem, you have actually created two things:

1. The poem.
2. The copyright to that poem.

Both of them belong to the author unless the author has assigned them to someone else.

As there are two things it must mean that different people can own them, although it doesn't make much sense: if you have assigned the ownership of the copyright to someone else then you cannot do anything with the poem. The new copyright owner can say what can be done with the poem.

Clearly the poem is a physical thing in that it is written on a piece of paper or is a file is a computer that can be printed on to a piece of paper.

The copyright is also a real entity in law but you have nothing to prove its existence. This is where the difficulty lies.

• You do not need to do anything at all to copyright something. As soon as you have created a work, you own the copyright to it. Think about the word itself: Copyright. You have created the work, so you now have the right to copy it and control how other people copy and use it.

When people ask the question "Have you copyrighted that?" what they really mean to ask is "Have you any way of proving your authorship of that?". This is the crux of the matter. If you give me a copy of one of your poems and I make off with it, copy it, put my name at the bottom and publish it, how can you prove that you actually wrote it?

We cannot carbon date a piece of paper to the day, so that won't help.

There are a legion of lawyers out there who will say "I will copyright that for you". Again, a misleading statement. What they are really offering to do is create some sort of registration of your work that would be accepted by a court of law as proof that you had ownership, and by implication authorship, of the work by a particular date.

The lawyer will ask a grand fee for doing this. There are cheaper ways.

The traditional way is to put your work in an envelope, address it to yourself and send it to yourself by registered post. Then do not open the envelope and put it somewhere safe.

The obvious problems with this approach are finding a safe place and the fact that if you ever need to use it you no longer have your sealed envelope.

A way that interests me is to put the material on a website. This might start to sound like an advert for sending in your poems, but please do not take it to be that. This idea as far as I know has never been tested in court, so these are simply my thoughts on this issue.

To understand why I think this idea works, you have to understand a tiny bit about computers. It isn't hard! It is simply that computers datestamp everything stored in them with the date and time down to the second.

When I click 'Save" to publish this blog, it will be put into a database and the record will get two datestamps. The first will never change. That is the create datestamp. The second one is the modified datestamp and shows when the blog was last amended.

It is true that a technical person with direct access to the computer could change those dates, but even that would be logged somewhere else in the computer. Computers keep lots of logs of what is done to them. Investigating these logs is one of the things computer forensic scientists do when they are investigating criminal use of computers.

So I think the trail left in a computer is a very good way of proving copyright. It is the main reason I publish my songs on sibeliusmusic.com. I don't expect anyone to look at them or buy them. But it not only keeps a copy 'off-site', but shows when I uploaded them.

I know that some people are concerned that if they put poems on a website then magazines or other publications might not want to print them. This is nothing to do with copyright. It is simply the editorial policy of that publication. They might conflate it with copyright in order to confuse you. It is because they are trying to steal your copyright. Copyright is a valuable possession that you own.

• Do not be fooled into thinking that because someone agrees to publish your poems in a book then they take ownership of the copyright. They do not unless you choose to give it to them. If you do choose to let them have it then you ought to be demanding a very large fee for it. In other words, assign it to someone else only if you choose to! Remember that you will then lose control of how your poem is used.

Personally, if I was to consider entering a poetry competition, for example, and the terms of the competition stated that the competition organisers would gain ownership of copyright of poems submitted, then I would steer clear of that competition. To me, that is simply theft. The same for magazines. We are very careful to assign copyright ownership to each poet for each poem on this site.

To summarise:

1. Copyright is automatically assigned to the author at the time of creation unless they are explicitly creating the work for a third party under a contract that assigns that copyright to the third party (e.g. an employer).
2. There is no such thing as copyrighting something.
3. Your copyright is yours. You can keep it, sell it or give it away. (You don't generally give away things you buy, so why would you give away something you've created to someone who intends to make commercial gain from it?).
4. Find a way of proving the date of creation and that you alone did it. You do not have to pay anyone for this unless you choose to.
5. Beware of slick-talking lawyers and sharks!

I hope this helps. If I haven't said something very clearly then please say so and I will try to clarify.