A company, organisation, or other people may also have copyrights to your work if you are their employee. It is called “work made for hire” and under the Copyright Act it is “a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his/her employment,” which basically means that whatever works you created in your job, it is owned by your employer.

The economic and moral rights also differ in how long they are valid and whether or not they can be transferred. The author’s economic rights are limited in time and they are hereditary, although they can be transferred to other people. The moral rights never expire and cannot be sold or transferred. However, the rights holder can choose to waive these rights.

Polish law regarding intellectual property is aligned with international regulations. Poland is a member of WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a specialised agency of the United Nations, and a signatory of the Berne Convention, which guarantees certain minimum protections for artistic and literary works for each member country.

The most commonly used free licences for sharing graphic art, music, videos and books are Creative Commons licences, with two the most popular ones being CC BY, which allows the use and distribution of a work in its original and modified form but with information about the author, the source, and the licence itself, and CC BY SA, which has an additional condition that there must be the same licence on any contribution made to the original work. The four components added to the Creative Commons licences are: BY attribution required, NC no commercial use, ND no derivative works, and SA share alike (the licence must be the same on all derivative works).

Although the copyright symbol is no longer required to receive copyright protection, it is good for the authors and creators to put it on their works so that an infringer cannot claim not to be aware of the copyright if you file an infringement suit in court. Unlike patents, the copyright registration process is not very expensive, and in the U.S.A. it usually costs between $35 and $55, and in Poland from 100 pln upwards, depending on the size of the material.

In addition to there being different types of intellectual property, copyright, patent and trademark also have different terms of protection. Copyright protects a work during the author’s life plus 70 more years, a patent is valid for 20 years, and a trademark protects the mark as long as it is used in commerce.

Many people confuse copyright infringement with plagiarism, and they are two different issues. Copyright is a law which protects original works from being copied and distributed without obtaining the author’s permission, while plagiarism is insisting that somebody else’s work is your own or not giving attribution. There is no state plagiarism law but there are some serious consequences for plagiarising.

Generally, claiming that you had no idea that someone else’s copyright material existed does not excuse you from using this material without the author’s permission. In certain situations, however, you may be able to quote fair use as your defence, depending on the purpose, nature, and the amount of the copyrighted work.

It’s interesting to know that the various notes on music and film discs forbidding private copying are in fact invalid. However, always check the applications (such as torrent sites) and services to find out if they share files with somebody else’s works outside the circle of your family and friends, and make sure that the work you share with your friends or family comes from a legal source.

Since you often see fair educational use at school, you may get used to using it more freely than it is allowed in other situations. Be aware of this fact when you start using copyrighted materials in public, and make sure that you follow the more restrictive criteria then.