The Artful Jurist

I was watching the TV show, Monk, the other night, and there was a scene in which a police lieutenant got miffed with his captain because, as the lieutenant saw it, the captain gave credit to another person for the very same crime theory the lieutenant had offered earlier.  The lieutenant's petulant response to this was that he was going to copyright his police notes from now on -- a notion the police captain looked on with disdain.  "You're going to copyright your police notes?"

Well, silly though it might sound, under the U.S. copyright law, a police officer's notes might be automatically copyrighted as soon as they're written.  Most anything original that's written down is automatically protected by copyright.  You don't have to register a writing for it to be protected.

Of course, if you're making police notes as part of your job as a law enforcement officer, it could be argued that the copyright actually belongs to your employer -- the law enforcement agency for whom the notes were created -- rather than to the officer.