How to Protect My Idea as a Copyright

This is Brian Hall, an attorney with Traverse Legal, PLC, an intellectual property law firm that helps clients throughout the world identify, protect, and enforce their intellectual property rights. Today, I will be answering the question: how to protect my idea. Now, this question is a very broad question, but there are several things that can be done in order to protect your idea. The context I want to look at this in deals with when you have an idea and you're telling it to other people in order to either get funding, or possibly make a prototype for a product, or for some other reason.

Before I answer that question, let's keep in mind that an idea can be protected via a patent. It can't necessarily be protected via copyright until that idea is captured in some tangible form or medium. While that all sounds like legal jargon, the reality is that an idea has limited ways to be protected under intellectual property law. An intellectual property lawyer can help define the best way to protect that idea.