These categories are broad enough to cover all sorts of media, old (books, plays, records) and new (CDs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, video games, software, etc.). They also cover advertising materials, trade publications, label designs, operations manuals, photographs, and databases. But your "work" cannot be just an idea (the notion of superheroes that can transform to fight evil) to qualify for copyright protection. It must be realized in a "fixed form"--a book, a computer disk, a website, or an actual TV series about transforming superheroes. And it has to be original, and be the result of at least some creativity.

Copyright lasts the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years if the creator is an individual, and between 95 and 125 years if the copyright is held by a business. Copyright gives you the right to sell the whole bundle of rights, or to unbundle the rights and sell or license them in a variety of ways. In book publishing, for example, you could license the right to reproduce the work to publishers abroad and to a paperback publisher in this country, as well as the right to prepare derivative works (a movie, a play, a TV show, etc.) based on the original work.