Los Angeles Lawyer Danny Andrews Writes Article Teaching You How To Protect Your Copyrights

As a lawyer in Los Angeles, the heart of the entertainment industry, I get hundreds of calls and emails from artists, writers, and producers alike asking me questions about how to protect their copyrights and other intellectual property.  But many people don't understand a very important provision in the Copyright Act of 1976 known as the "work made for hire" provision.  If you are like most creative people today, you understand that to be successful or to be discovered, you've got to do a lot of the work on the front-end, yourself.  Artists today are serving as their own publicists, managers, marketing team, and even record labels.   

Have you ever hired someone to create a track for, design a website, write an article for your online magazine, or take photographs for your album cover? Or, maybe you’ve done most of the work, but asked someone to write the introduction to the book you plan to self-publish or write the hook to your new song.  Sound familiar?  This happens all the time.  So, here’s the question of the hour:  When you hire someone to do creative work for you, do you legally own the work?   

You may think that because you paid someone to do the work or because you did most of the work and they only added what you deem to be a trifling portion, that you own the copyright exclusively.  But, like George and Ira Gershwin once said, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.  The general rule of copyright is, the person who creates the work, owns the work.  But this is not always the case.  As with most intellectual property laws, there are exceptions to rules.  To see the full article that I wrote on this topic, please click here: http://dannyandrews.com/?p=128.  

And as usual, for more information and updates on this article or any other matter, please fee free to contact me, Danny Andrews by visiting www.dannyandrews.com