Copyright is a type of intellectual property
It gives the owner the exclusive right to produce, reproduce, perform, publish, adapt, translate, or telecommunicate a work, and to determine how others may do these things.

Copyright doesn't protect everything
Copyright does not protect ideas or facts, but rather the expression of these things once they are 'fixed' (digitally or physically). These expressions are generally referred to as "works" which encompasses books, musical scores, recordings, videos, poems, photographs, paintings, sculptures, websites, and more. 

Usually the creator of a work is the first copyright owner. 
However, individual copyrights may be broken up and assigned, licensed, or sold to other people (e.g. an author assigning digital publishing copyrights to their publisher). This means that the author or creator of a work may not always be the copyright owner.