The Ex­ec­u­tive Pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Copy­right Col­lec­tion Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TTCO) is urg­ing cre­atives to reg­is­ter their artis­tic cre­ations and in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty to en­sure they can have the full pro­tec­tion of copy­right law.

“This reg­is­tra­tion of­fers a vi­tal lay­er of le­gal pro­tec­tion, strength­ens claims in any dis­pute, and can serve as ev­i­dence in a court of law,” As­ten G. Isaac, TTCO Ex­ec­u­tive Pres­i­dent, said in a state­ment.

The ad­vice comes in the wake of the copy­right judg­ment in­volv­ing the Es­tate of the Late Leroy Cal­liste—“Black Stal­in”. A judg­ment was ren­dered against his wid­ow, Janet Cal­liste, for the unau­tho­rized use of a pho­to­graph in pro­mo­tion­al ma­te­r­i­al for a trib­ute event. She in­tends to ap­peal the rul­ing.

Isaac be­lieves the court mat­ter pro­vides a crit­i­cal teach­ing mo­ment for “all stake­hold­ers in our cul­tur­al and cre­ative in­dus­tries.”

“The rul­ing un­der­scores, a truth that TTCO has long cham­pi­oned: in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty is a re­al and en­force­able right, and it must be treat­ed with the same se­ri­ous­ness and re­spect as any oth­er form of prop­er­ty,” he stat­ed.

“The pho­tog­ra­ph­er in this case, Mr. An­ge­lo Mar­celle, had reg­is­tered his im­age and was with­in his rights to pur­sue le­gal re­course. This is not mere­ly a le­gal tech­ni­cal­i­ty — it is a clear demon­stra­tion of the pow­er and pro­tec­tion that copy­right reg­is­tra­tion pro­vides to cre­ators. Copy­right law, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it ap­plies to pho­tographs and artis­tic works, is un­am­bigu­ous: use with­out au­tho­riza­tion con­sti­tutes in­fringe­ment,” the TTCO boss ex­plained.

He urged all con­tent cre­ators — pho­tog­ra­phers, mu­si­cians, writ­ers, video­g­ra­phers, de­sign­ers — to for­mal­ly reg­is­ter their work un­der the ap­pro­pri­ate cat­e­go­ry with TTCO.

“In par­tic­u­lar, pho­tog­ra­phers and vi­su­al artists should en­sure that their work is reg­is­tered un­der the cat­e­go­ry of ‘Artis­tic Works – Pho­tographs and Im­ages’,” he said.

He al­so ad­vised event pro­mot­ers, pub­lic re­la­tions pro­fes­sion­als, and me­dia or­gan­i­sa­tions to en­sure they, too, are on the right side of copy­right law by ver­i­fy­ing the own­er­ship and us­age rights of all ma­te­ri­als they in­cor­po­rate in their cam­paigns.

“What may seem like a small over­sight can have ma­jor fi­nan­cial and rep­u­ta­tion­al con­se­quences,” he warned.

The TTCO boss says the or­gan­i­sa­tion will soon launch a pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion cam­paign ti­tled "Re­spect the Right – Reg­is­ter to Pro­tect", aimed at rais­ing aware­ness and sim­pli­fy­ing the copy­right reg­is­tra­tion process for all cre­atives in Trinidad and To­ba­go.