Copyright

A copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted by government for a limited time to protect the particular form, way or manner in which an idea or information is expressed. Copyright may subsist in a wide range of creative or artistic forms or works including litrary works, movies, musical works, sound recordings, paintings, photographs, software, and industrial designs. Copyright is a type of intellectual property. What if I take someone else's writings, text, HTML or graphic image and change it around to suit my needs? I own the "new" version, right? If you did any of that with the original owner's permission, and according to his/her terms and conditions than you own the "new" version. If not you may be committing copyright infringement and/or plagiarism. What if I translate your copyright page into another language? I bet I don't need your permission, and I own the "new" work! The Berne Convention states, "Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this Convention shall enjoy the exclusive right of making and of authorizing the translation of their works throughout the term of protection of their rights in the original works There are no "international copyrights" that enable you protect your work throughout the world. However, most countries are members of the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), which allow you to protect your works in countries of which you are not a citizen or national. Under these treaties, the following works may be protected: (i) both unpublished and published works of an author who is a national or resident of a country that is a member of these treaties; or (ii) published works, with permission, of an author who is not a national or resident of a country that is a member of these treaties. In this case a work may be considered simultaneously published in several countries if it has been published in two or more Berne Union countries within 30 days of its first publication.

from wikipedia : Copyright is a set of exclusive rights regulating the use of a particular expression of an idea or information. At its most general, it is literally "the right to copy" an original creation. In most cases, these rights are of limited duration. The symbol for copyright is © (Unicode U+00A9), and in some jurisdictions may alternatively be written as either (c) or (C). see more details here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright