Copyright law secures for the creator of a creative effort the exclusive right to control who can make copies, or make works derived from the original work. There are a lot of subtleties and international variations but that's the gist of it. If you create something, and it fits the definition of a creative work, you get to control who can make copies of it and how they make copies, with some important exceptions.
You can also sell or licence this right, or, if you do the work for somebody who hired you to do it, they buy this right in advance.

Creative Work
The first big issue involves defining what it is to make a creative work. The law requires that it exist in some tangible form -- it can't just be in your head or sailing through the ether, it has to be on disk, paper, carved in stone (sculpture) or the like. It has to be creative (that's a tough one for lawyers to define) and that means it can't just be factual data. But most things you write in English are going to be creative works, plus anything you photograph or sculpt or draw or record. (What you say isn't copyrighted until it's put onto tape -- it has to be in tangible form.) Anything you write and post to USENET is almost certainly a creative, copyrightable work. Anything you post-process with a computer (like object code) is a derivative work, still copyrighted.
You can also do creative editing or collecting work. So that while facts can't be copyrighted, clever, creative organization of the facts can be. This is called a compilation copyright and it's somewhat complex.

There are some specific exceptions in some countries. Fonts as printed on paper can't be copyrighted for historical reasons. Nothing done by the U.S. government can be copyrighted inside the USA.

And of course you can't copyright something somebody else did without their permission, or derive your work from their work.

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