Ah, copyright. Note that I am not a lawyer (but I am married to one) and you cannot nor should take this as specific legal advice. Please consider this an educated layperson's interpretation for fellow laypeople! Consult an attorney of your own if you're inclined to move forward on such things.
On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 2:11 PM, John Rodriguez <jrodriguez...@eap.edu> wrote: > ... > > How do I register my origami work? If you mean register a copyright, first understand you do not need to do anything to *have* a copyright in something. As soon as you have created it, you have a copyright in it. (Assuming it is an "original work[...] of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression" which are the words from the US statute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102) That said, if you do register your work with the US copyright office, then if someone infringes your work and you sue them and you win, you're entitled to "statutory damages" - the legally-proscribed amounts of money for each case of infringement. These are large sums of money, which can make it worth one's while to register a work (which is expensive.) But notice the chain of "ifs" - someone must infringe upon your work, you have to sue them, and you have to win the suit. If the work is worth a lot, then it can be worth one's while to register it. But for a single origami piece, it's probably cost-prohibitive. Also, it's important to understand what the "work" is. It is not the folding sequence itself: copyright does not protect ideas. You have a copyright in a particular set of origami instructions (drawn, video, etc.), the crease pattern, and the finished piece itself (as a piece of sculptural art.) > How can I check if the model was designed or discovered before? This is a much harder question. There is no central database of origami designs. (And ever if there were, how would it work? I've long wondered if one could use fingerprint-scanning logic to, say, compare crease patterns, and try to determine that way if a piece is different from another... anyone want to write such a system?) You can look through books, dig through the Origami Database (oriwiki.com), you can ask here on the list or other Internet channels, you can scour photo sites for similar work. But even if someone else has created a piece, it is still possible for you to have come up with it entirely on your own. It is hard to prove this, of course (hard to prove a negative - "I never saw that book") but it does happen, especially with modular origami, or simple pieces. If you truly come up with something yourself, and someone else also has done so, then you BOTH have a copyright in the piece. A lot of the time, the later creator will give credit to the earlier one, but explain that they created theirs independently, and that seems to satisfy most people. Maybe some creators can weigh in on this situation. > I know a variation doesn't count, but what is the limit of a variation and > a original work? This is very much a gray area, and not easy to define even for types of art that have a lot of copyright cases decided about them (music, video, photography, etc.) There are somewhat elusive concepts in play in the statutes and case law (e.g. "derivative work" and "transformative use") that do not exactly mean what the words usually mean in English, and make it hard to nail this issue down precisely. But since copyright is about creativity, specifically, if you make changes to something and those changes themselves are sufficiently creative - not obvious, not taking one thing and changing the shaping, say - then it might well be a new work. I hope that helps a bit, anyway! Anne
