If you have a good idea, you are probably wondering how to protect it and if you really should. Worried about where to start and how. The thought of looking for and hiring an attorney with expertise on the field just makes you dizzy, it makes the process seem endless, complicated and expensive. So you decide to make the mistake that many artist, entrepreneurs and creative make. You dice you can trust your work to a couple of good friends, or maybe couple of serious investors and the most optimistic daring ones just put it online for the whole world to see. To be honest I have done this myself, I just don't like to expend my time on noncreative endeavors, plus I am impatient. It would be great if we didn't need to protect our ideas, then again you can always come up with new ones, right? Yes, but why would you let anyone else take credit and money for your ideas and the unique way you express them? Leaving your creative work unregistered is worse than leaving a signed checkbook in a crowded place. Specially now that there are so many easy, fast and inexpensive ways of protecting your work.

As you probably know the internet is here to stay and keep growing, which is a great thing for us creative people. So the first thing to do is to register the domain name of your project or completed work, weather it is the lyrics to a song, music, scripts for television, radio and theatre, choreography and pantomime, motion pictures, and other audiovisual works, books, poetry, essays, lectures, computer programs, Web sites, a screenplay, artwork, drawings, paintings, murals, reproductions of works of art, maps, sculpture, architectural and other technical drawings, game rules, greeting cards, comic strips, and fabric designs, photos, advertisement, company logos, digital illustrations or whatever your creative mind has produced, if you haven't named your work do it and register domain name for it, you can do this very inexpensively, try to get .com .tv both or more variations if possible and stay away from .org unless you are non profit or plan to be. By doing this you will find out if someone is already using the your desired name online, you can also find out who they are and if they plan to use it, they might even be willing to sell it. If you are lucky and the name you want is available, register it immediately. This will give you the right to use it online and the possibility to build a blog, a website, or an ecommerce store for it, if you wish. Remember that people can register variations of your name and use it but once you register you name, no one may use that exact same one, as long as you keep renewing your registration.

The second thing is to register your work for federal copyright. Now you can do this very fast, easily and inexpensively online, just answer a couple of questions and submit your work. Then you got to wait for the government to answer but if it's your original work, you shouldn't have a problem.

The third and most important is never show your work to anyone before you do all of the above.