as any drawing / painting / and original artistic material they can be covered by copyright laws anywhere. u can actually register a new product/invention with sketches as u can register hand-made plans which r nothing more than technical sketches dont u think???

Hi
This is an interesting issue, but maby some real examples show better what copyright is about. The music industrie think copyright is made for them where fact is that even the CD media was made for data not for just music, even then in this contry you have to pay pop music for using the media develobed for storing data as the music industrie found out that CD\s was just perfect to replace old vinyl ,so while new arts evolve based on this media, those who profit stole it for their own porpus leaving any but pop music artists to se how to find their bread.

i've worked in an office where we used to stick little copyright stickers similar to the ones in our plans on every sketch that went out for submittal. they were plain clear sticky backs ran through the xerox machine. we also ran copies of our company name and logo and stuck them on the sketch, which made the sketch a little official looking but conveyed the copyright idea.

The fact that you have drawn the idea and signed and dated it is copyright itself.

uk and general commonwealth laws - your sketches are more copyrighted that you produced plans. Because they are hand produced and identify only one creater