(a ton more useful information about screenwriting)
copyright
The legal protection of creative ideas. A writer automatically owns copyright on anything she writes, even without official governmental registration. One exception is works-for-hire, in which the copyright rests with the entity paying for the work1). Registering written material with the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) is not the same as copyright, although it does help prove exactly when something was written.
1)
In the US, copyright can only be transferred by a separate, explicit document called a Certificate of Authorship aka C of A
