Ok, maybe some of you have been to my webpages. If you have then you know I have poems and stories on them.
I personally don’t feel that anybody is going to steal them, because I don’t think they are worth being stolen. My BF is more cynical and insists I’m asking for trouble by not having them copyrighted.
So, how should I get them copyrighted? Or, short of that, how can I protect myself on the net? Or do I just have to take my chances and hope for the best?
In the US, you get a copyright as you as you put your work into some tangible form. (There is a fancier term for this.)
You can register your poems with the Copyright Office and pay the fees if you feel inclined to sue people who republish them and you want to get punitive damages from them. Without registration, all you could get would be actual damages.
Click here to go to an informative Copyright Basics page from the U.S. Copyright Office.
They could make new laws about this & the net soon because the pictures stay in thousands of person’s browser caches, which makes copyright meaningless.
beatle is right on top of things as usual.
However you can do the poor man’s copyright. Write the poems down, put them in a sealed envelope and send them to yourself. Leave them sealed and the post office’s “time stamp” will serve to show they were yours first.
There will be posts to follow that will say this won’t hold up in court but I know of no cases where it hasn’t. And it will make you feel better.
Copyright is far from meaningless.
And I will point out that this has little legal bearing (ask a lawyer). How can you prove that the stories you claim were in the envelope were there when it was mailed? Besides, copyright infringement suits rarely require any elaborate proof about who was first. Since the “poor man’s copyright” isn’t registered, its use doesn’t give you any more rights than any unregistered copyright.
Getting back to the OP, if you put a copyright notice on your page, (and even if you can’t) you can get a judge to require the infringer stop distributing the material. If you could prove actual damages (extremely difficult), you can get that. However, to get any sort of punitive damages – and to force the infringer to pay your attorney’s fees – you need to register.
It costs $30 to register these days. If you think it’s worth it, by all means do so.
Thank you everybody for your suggestions. I really really appreciate them!
Over the years I have had several instances of my threads and postings being lifted without permission and published on web sites and in one case a Canadian magazine without permission or attribution. I really didn’t care that much as it was sort of flattering in a way but…per Peppergirl’s example if someone lifted my personal poems from my web page without attribution and made commercial use of them "(ie “How Not To Write Poetry 101”) I think I would be pretty peeved so copyright is a “good” thing.
Oh boy… thinking twice about letting my Daughter use Napster now.
Ouch!
$ 30 to register? Boy that’s cheap. I was looking at trademark registration & it seems to be about $400.00, which doesn’t seem that fair.
Copyright registration and trademark registration don’t much in common.
Trademarks are purely commercial matters. They serve only to protect the name of a product or service. A trademark is supposed to make it easier for the registrant to make money off of the good name of his product. A copyright just tells other people that “Hey, I wrote/composed/performed/drew/painted this thing! Hands off!”
There are a lot more copyrights than there are trademarks. Also, it costs the Patent and Trademark Office a lot more to process a trademark application than the Copyright Office to process a copyright registration.
All the Copyright Office does with an application is look at it, stamp it, send the mandatory deposit copies over to the Library of Congress, and file it in the requisite places. The Copyright Office probably doesn’t even bother to see if you filed an exact duplicate of an existing work. That’s a matter for the courts to sort out. Unless you try to copyright the few things which are explicitly exempted from copyright (like a slogan or a multiplication table), you’ve got yourself a copyright.
Trademarks have to be examined to see if they conflict with any other trademarks. They have to “published for opposition” to let everybody else get their chance to challenge it. There is more paperwork that comes about when the trademark gets renewed.