Now for the bloggers out there. Use these practical tips to properly protect your copyrights on the internet.
1. Do place a copyright notice on your site. This will not stop individuals from stealing your work, but it may give them pause.
2. Use Copyscape. Copyscape will search the web for copies of your work on the internet. Having the DO NOT COPY widget on your blog will deter some infringers.
3. Register your copyrighted post with the US Copyright Office. I know you are thinking that registering every post will cost you a fortune especially if you have been blogging for more than a year. Well good news! The US Copyright Office will allow an applicant to register collections of works. So you can register your archives from a particular year as one collection. The cost to register a collection of works is the same $45 fee ($35 online) as it is to register one work. For example, you can register all of your posts from the year 2007 as one collection. Entitle the Collection, "My Blog Name, 2007 Collection."
4. Moving forward and if your budget allows, register small collections of your post every 90 days. This will ensure that you can go after a recent infringer within the 90 day time period in order to receive guaranteed federal monetary damages. Read about this 90 day rule here.
I hope this information was helpful. As always if you have any further questions please, contact me at lgivens@phillipsgivenslaw.com.
4 comments:
Thanks for sharing! One question regarding #3:
Will registering an entire collection together cause any issues in the case of a dispute of one of those works?
To my understanding, I know there's an issue with the "self-mailed" concept of copyright protection when including multiple works; but what about these registrations? I was under the impression that the copyright office only protects titles, but not content.
Thanks
TO: makingthemogul.com
Hello! Registering an entire collection will not cause an issue in the case of a dispute. I am unclear about your second questions re: self-mailing can you clarify. The Copyright Office most certaintly protects content. Please email me if you have any further questions at lgivens@phillipsgivenslaw.com.
Thanks so much for visiting and reading!
Thanks for clarifying that.
Regarding the self-mailing issue; I meant the advice a lot of songwriters are given is to mail themselves a copy of their songs via the post-office (so that it's officially date-stamped) and keep it unopened in a safe place until they need to dispute it in court, at which point, a judge will break the seal and reveal the contents.
A lot of upcoming songwriters make the mistake of mailing themselves multiple works in one envelope, however if they need to dispute one of those works in court, the others are no longer protected by the original date-stamp since they weren't relevant to the dispute; so I was just curious if registration through the Copyright Office works similarly.
I'm in Canada though, so Intellectual Property rights and laws are definitely different.
The Canadian Intellectual Copyright Office only protects titles; not content, so I was curious if the Copyright Office in the US worked in a similar fashion.
Thanks again for clarifying. I enjoy your site and look forward to reading more.
To makingthemogul.com:
Hello again! No the US Copyright Office does not work like that. However, it is important to label multiple works under one copyright as a collection. So for example, "The Archives Songs, Volume 1". I always advise my clients to register multiple songs as Volumes = one collection. All songs will be protected in this scenario.
US Copyright Law protects the expression of ideas and not titles.
Thanks again for reading. It is nice to meet someone from Canada. I hope to keep the content helpful!
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