From: Mark Roberts
John Francis wrote:
>On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 04:19:55PM -0500, Mark Roberts wrote:
>>
>> But if you don't *register* your copyright with the copyright office,
>> you can't (in the U.S. anyway) take an infringer to court.
>
>That's not my understanding.
>
>If you don't register the copyright, you can't have an action brought
>for criminal copyright infringement, and you can't receive a statutary
>damage award. But you can still (attempt to) go after them for actual
>damages (probably in small claims court).
Nope. Copyright issues can be heard *only* in Federal court. They were
very specific about that at the ASMP seminar. If you don't register,
you can forget going to court.
You can go into court whether the image is registered or not. But it's
going to cost you a lot of money if you do.
You don't want to go to court, you just want them to pay you.
Registration is the simplest, best way to achieve that.
The benefit of registration is you have a Prima facie case. Their use of
your registered image is itself proof of the infringement.
You probably shouldn't even have to go into court to collect. If their
lawyer has half a lick of sense, as soon as you provide a copy of the
registration notice, they're almost certainly going to settle up and pay
out of court.
Plus, if they refuse to settle, and you do have to go to court, they
have to pay your legal expenses along with the statutory damages, $750 -
$30,000 per instance of infringement at the discretion of the court & an
additional $150,000 per instance for WILLFUL infringement. ... and any
punitive damages the jury decides upon.
Willful means they did it on purpose. If they continued to use your
image after notification of copyright infringement, especially if you
have *registered* your copyright, that would be a *willful* infringement.
Again, the key is that having a registered copyright is all the proof of
the infringement that you need. And because they have to pay your legal
expenses for enforcing your copyright, they can't just smother you in
corporate lawyers to bankrupt you out of your day in court.
Disclaimer: IANAL - I attended the same ASMP copyright workshop (in a
different city) Mark attended.
ASMP also offers the basics of the copyright workshop as an on-line
tutorial, free to all, if anyone wants to look it over:
http://asmp.org/content/registration-counts
One of the things I took away from the workshop is that ASMP is working
closely with the Copyright Office to convince Congress to amend the
copyright laws to create a special category for photographers, where we
could pay an annual fee and upload unlimited numbers of photos during
the year. I think that ties into the Adobe/Apple - Lightroom/Aperture
initiative.
They're also trying to get the Copyright Office to change the way they
treat "published" and "unpublished" images. Right now, you cannot submit
both images in the same registration. ASMP would like to change the
system so they're treated exactly the same; you would no longer have to
segregate them in your submissions.
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