Copyrighting Your Pieces: Let’s Not Confuse The Moral Value With The Legal Value

Copyrighting Your Pieces

People think that they can copyright their designs, and this single act will be sufficient to prevent people from copying their work. However, to prove that someone has violated the copyright, and to sue them in court, is difficult, time-consuming and expensive to do.

A copyright is a grant from the United States Government for a specific jewelry design. It can cover the actual piece and the drawings for the piece, but cannot cover a specific idea or concept. You can only copyright something that is tangible.

Your registration covers the specific design, and may be flexible to cover a color change. However, if there is any obvious change in the piece — different shapes, different patterns, different sense of dimensionality — , you would want to register each variation on a core design.

You can also copyright a “collection of jewelry”, but you can’t add new designs to the collection, without getting new copyrights. In the collection, the pieces would need to share design elements and sensibilities, and these would need to be obvious.

Copyrights last for the life of the designer plus 70 years. Use form VA (Visual Arts). It usually takes about a year for the paperwork to go through, but…