Jump for Joy! by dospaz

DISCLAIMER: Recent conversations with the Copyright Office have led me to change my stance regarding blogs and copyright registration. Please see this post for my updated views.

I finally decided to practice what I preach and I registered the copyrights in my blogs over the weekend. For those of you who don’t know, I have two blogs: this one and my personal blog The Undeniable Ruth. I post weekly on each one.

My work only exists on my websites so the first thing I had to do was create a document that compiled all of my posts for each blog. This blog wasn’t too bad since I’ve only had it since January. I’ve been publishing weekly on The Undeniable Ruth since January 2010, not to mention all the extra posts I did for Sponsor A Law Kid, so creating a master document for that took the better part of two days. That was a pain in the ass that I don’t want to repeat. Once I had these documents created, I saved them as PDFs.

The first time I used the U.S. Copyright Office website, it was kind of stressful. It isn’t always obvious what you’re supposed to do to create a profile and to apply to register your copyright. I had to read each screen at least twice to make sure I was filling everything out properly. You have to go through about eight screens to fill out the application, upload your document, and pay the fee ($35 for literary work). It was really weird that the site makes you pay the fee first and then upload your work.

You have the option to submit your work and payment online or to send it in. According to the site it currently takes about 2.5 months to process your application if you do it electronically and 6.5 months if you mail in your work.

Once I got through the copyright application process once, the second time through went much faster. If you’re looking to register your copyrights, I strongly recommend doing it the first time with a copyright attorney or someone who has gone through the process before. As an intellectual property attorney, I had the benefit of understanding all the verbiage on the application which made it easier to navigate.

This was the first of several copyright applications to come. Since my work is on my blogs, I have to re-register my work every three months to ensure that my new content is protected. You have copyright rights in your work the moment you create them, but you have to register your work if you want to sue someone for infringement if they steal your content. If you register your work within three months of publication or one month of learning of the infringement (whichever is first!), you’re eligible for attorneys’ fees and statutory damages which can go up to $150,000. If you don’t register within this time period, you’re only eligible for your actual damages, which in the world of  blogging could be $0.00.

If you have a blog, I recommend registering your work every three months. Put a standing reminder to yourself on your calendar. Start a master document for your blog posts now so you don’t have the arduous task of compiling your work every time it’s time to re-register your work. If you don’t want to do this yourself, hire an attorney to do it for you. The time to protect your work is now. If wait until someone steals your work, the options you have left may not be worth pursuing.

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Folklore NullElf: Burning Copyright by Martin Fisch

This post was originally published on The Undeniable Ruth in October 2011. 

DISCLAIMER: Recent conversations with the Copyright Office have led me to change my stance regarding blogs and copyright registration. Please see this post for my updated views.

I’m working on my first ebook, which is tentative titled The Legal Side of Blogging. During law school, I wrote a substantial research paper on copyright, defamation, and privacy issues related to blogging. I also wrote a blog series called Can My Blog Get Me Sued, Arrested, Fired, or Killed. It made sense to combine the material from these two projects and present them in a way that was useful to the average blogger for my first solo book project.

Blogs didn’t exist when the Copyright Act was written or last revised. The drafters only considered literary works that are published on paper when they wrote the law. When it comes to copyrighting blogs and websites, the best we can do is to try to find the digital equivalent to the works published on paper and register them accordingly.

The purpose of the Copyright Act is to protect advancements in the arts and sciences by giving authors and artists protection for the works they create. Copyright protection is afforded to every original expression that is fixed in a tangible medium. The law was written to protect things like books, photographs, music, sculptures, paintings, and audiovisual works. Works that exist only in an electronic form are fixed in a tangible medium, and thus, the law protects them.

I’ve spent hours considering the copyright implications of blogging and discussed it at length with my cyberspace law professor. We came to the conclusion that bloggers who blog on a set schedule are most like people who write a column in a newspaper or a magazine; and therefore their blogs should be able to be registered as serial works.

A single work can be registered with the United States Copyright Office for $35. If you publish a blog every week and register it, that will cost $1820 each year. The benefit of having a serial work is that you only have to register it every 3 months for $65, which is only $260 for the year. This saves a lot of time and money.

This week I was working on my ebook and I needed some clarification on how bloggers should go about registering their works, so I called the Copyright Office. The operator was very helpful in directing me to the circular on serial works, and she thought my ebook idea was interesting.  About five minutes later, I had a follow up question so I called her back. She said she was glad I called back because she needed to tell me that blogs cannot be registered as serial works. The only thing a blogger can do is register each post individually!

Seriously?!?!?!

I can see the Copyright Office requiring individual registrations for each post for someone who only writes sporadically; but this rule makes no sense for someone who posts on a weekly basis. They should be given the same protection as any other writer who publishes in a similar fashion in a newsletter, journal, or magazine.  Thankfully, the law protects writers’ and artists’ work the second a work is created, not from the date it is registered. The benefit of copyright registration is that you get to collect attorneys’ fees and statutory damages if someone steals your work and you successfully sue them.

I used to think that the best thing a blogger can do is register their blog as a serial work and use Google Alerts to monitor the internet for possible infringement. With this latest development, it makes more sense not to register every blog post you write, but only those  that you expect someone will try to pass off as their work. You can still use Google Alerts to police the internet for potential infringers. You just won’t be eligible for attorneys’ fees or statutory damages if your work hasn’t been registered within 3 months of publication if you find that someone is passing off one of your blog posts as their own. However, you can probably still get the post removed from the infringer’s website using a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.