By Ashrujit Basu

Quora is a very powerful medium for exchanging knowledge and getting connected with right people while seeking answer from any specific domain of expertise like Business, Spirituality or Law. Being an Entrepreneur and Intellectual Property Lawyer I seldom write and give answer to queries on Quora (https://www.quora.com/profile/Ashrujit-Basu?srid=TdHJ&share=a9c5c9a8)

Today, somebody asked me about the Procedure of conducting Copyright Search for specific Key words or Word phases etc. Many other Domain experts answered before me to the fellow seeker about the availability of Trademark Search with IP India’s website and how key phases are not copyrightable but Trademark-able. After seeing that an idea popped out in my mind suddenly that if key phases or one-liner captions and tag lines are only a Trademark matter then what about those new age content writers who are very experimental about their content but not necessarily for pertaining to any Brand or uses in Trade, whereas Trademark meant to be a Business Use only while copyright is only for Creative people.

 

Therefore, many writers mainly content writers are absolutely making content from different prospective all together. In that case, new age content Writer do write micro stories, develop one liner messages and hell lots of cool literary experimental stuff which are definitely copyrightable.

 

Copyright subsists throughout India in the following classes of works:

 

• Original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works;

 

• Cinematograph films; and

 

• Sound recordings.

 

Now, any micro story or one-liner creative writing messages falls under the first category itself and that is “Original Literary Work”.  Now, key challenges for conducting Copyright Searches are India Copyright Office does not have any Public Search Option unlike Trademark Registry, India.

 

Now, how to conduct a copyright search for these special type of literary classes of work:

 

Before stating the procedure for conducting searches, I would like to inform you that copyright law is having a global exposer thanks to Berne Convention. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention) so all the member States in Berne Convention equally enjoy Copyright Protection irrespective of the home country for filling (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_international_copyright_agreements).

 

Therefore, this list also includes United States as a member of Berne Convention for protecting International Literary work. Whereas, Indian Copyright does not have any public registry for maintaining copyrighted but work USA does.

 

Search Procedure:

 

We follow variety of expert search procedure for finding the copyrighted substance from a work. Although it will be little bit difficult for a non-copyright expert to conduct and prepare a full search report but one can always learn DIY  process.

Here is How to do:

 

The US Copyright Catalog (from 1978-present) is available through the U.S. Copyright Office (http://Copyright.gov) website, which is maintained by the US Copyright Office. From the U.S. Copyright Office (http://Copyright.gov) homepage, users can select the “Search Copyright Records” option to view the “Search Copyright Information” webpage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enter a term in the search form and select a field from the menu of options to search within (title, name, keyword, registration number, document number, or command keyword). Descriptions of search types and various hints for effective searching are displayed on the bottom half of the page. Users may define the number of records they want to display per page (10, 25, 50, or 100), and they can also select the “Set Search Limits” option to filter results by date or item type. Choose the “Begin Search” button to conduct the search, or clear the search form through the “Reset” button.

 

As an user you can narrow down the searches by providing specific key words and phrases to find out your phases are already in the registry or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conclusion:

 

So this is way of searching for Key phases really help writers to safe guard themselves from making any mistake of stepping on somebody else’s work being unaware. 

 

My original Quota answer:

( https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-check-if-a-word-or-phrase-is-copyrighted/answer/Ashrujit-Basu?srid=TdHJ&share=5e25cb40 )

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