Homophones. For some people they are a source of confusion. While bear and bare are easy to differentiate, the more unusual ones – those not used in too many everyday conversations – can cause trouble, like copywriting and copyrighting. Here we’ll talk about the difference between copywriting and copyrighting.
©opyrighting – A brief explanation
The supposed history of copyrighting has a clandestine element to it, if you read it on QuestionCopyright.org. Briefly, the website states that it was originally intended as a way for the English government to control the publication of written material with the aim of ensuring that potentially subversive materials never saw the light of day.
Today, copyrighting, as it is widely understood, is intended to ‘protect the rights’ of artists and other individuals who publish media (books, films, songs, and so on). In other words, it is supposed to ward off unauthorized usage. For instance, this post may not be republished on another website without our express permission.
A copyright can be altered to suit a particular item: some prohibit the reproduction (in any way) of a particular piece of publication. Other licenses exist that allow free usage and alteration of a certain product or material for commercial and private purposes, such as The MIT License.
In short: a copyright prescribes restrictions on published materials.
Before the Copyright – Copywriting
Speaking of copyrighting work to limit distribution and usage rights, let’s take a look at the creation of the works those rights are intended to protect. Specifically, let’s take a look at the written word. Even more specific, let’s take a look at the written word intended to sell: words used to sell a product or service are written by a copywriter. The act of doing so is called copywriting. Copywriting is used to create brochures, brochure pages on websites (static content intended to sell a product or service), radio ads, TV ads, billboards, technical manuals for products, and so on.
Contrast this with writing intended to enhance a website’s SEO status, to discuss a topic – like this one – on a blog, or to communicate what happened last month in an email newsletter – this is called content writing. Interestingly, these mentioned items are often written by a copywriter.
It’s also interesting to note that the words in a novel, in a newspaper or magazine, on a blog post, and so on, are known as copy. But the people writing the copy are called a novelist, journalist, or blogger respectively.
And once all those words have been written and the final product is ready for publishing, the publishers or creators themselves will often apply a copyright to dissuade the unauthorised use of their work.