{"id":42,"date":"2019-03-11T13:09:55","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T13:09:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.usnh.edu\/copyrightforcontentcreators\/chapter\/week-7-lecture-notes-copyright-enforcement-remedies\/"},"modified":"2023-05-11T12:39:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-11T12:39:24","slug":"week-7-lecture-notes-copyright-enforcement-remedies","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.usnh.edu\/copyrightforcontentcreators\/chapter\/week-7-lecture-notes-copyright-enforcement-remedies\/","title":{"raw":"Week 7 Lecture Notes: Copyright Enforcement & Remedies","rendered":"Week 7 Lecture Notes: Copyright Enforcement & Remedies"},"content":{"raw":"

Notice<\/h1>\nYou\u2019ve probably seen the copyright notice symbol, \u00a9, the \u201cc\u201d in a circle many times.  Usually it is followed by the year of publication of the item and the name of the copyright holder.  Recall from week one that, currently, putting copyright notice on a work is not a requirement for copyright to exit.  But it used to be.  Any work published in the United States before 1978 had to have this notice on the work, or copyright didn\u2019t exist in the work.  For example, someone forgot to add a copyright notice to the title screen of the movie Night of the Living Dead<\/a>, and so it immediately entered into the public domain.\n\n \n\nWhile not necessary for copyright to exist, there are still good reasons to put copyright notice on your work.  First, putting notice on your work signals to the world that you are aware of your rights as a copyright holder, and may discourage people from engaging in certain infringing activities.\n\n \n\nSecondly, notice may help you in the instance where you do end up bringing a lawsuit.  Bringing a lawsuit is an expensive proposition, and the likelihood of receiving sufficient damages to cover legal costs increases if it can be proved that the infringement was willful, i.e. that the person knew what they were doing was infringement.  It is harder to argue that you didn\u2019t know you were infringing if there was copyright notice on the work.\n\n \n\nRemember that Creative Commons licenses are built on top of existing copyright laws, so that even if you have shared your work under a CC license, you can still put copyright notice on your work and also register it with the Copyright Office.\n

Registration<\/h1>\nJust like copyright notice, registering a work with the Copyright Office used to be a requirement for copyright to exist, but this hasn\u2019t been true since March 1, 1989.  You do not need to register your work with the Copyright Office to be the copyright owner, but again, there are some good reasons for doing so, the most important one being that you must register a work before you can bring a lawsuit against someone for infringement.\n\n \n\nRegistration requires completion of a copyright registration form, payment of fee, and two copies of the work (if the work is published, only one copy is required for unpublished works.)\n\n \n\nThere are a variety of different forms used to register different kinds of works: TX for text based works, VA (visual arts) for images, PA (performing arts) for dramatic works and song lyrics, and SR for sound recordings.  It is possible to register a group of photographs together using one registration.  Group registration can save quite a lot of money because you only pay the registration fee once, instead of for each photo separately.  There are also special forms that newspapers and other periodicals can use to register all of the works they publish within a certain time frame.  You can register your copyright in any of these formats online at copyright.gov<\/a>.  Printable versions<\/a> of all these forms are also available there.\n\n \n\nYou have the option to register multimedia works (text with images, for example) together or as separate works.  Registering them together costs less in registration fees, but may also mean you earn less in damages should you ever end up bringing a lawsuit.\n\n \n\nRegistration fees<\/a> vary depending on the nature of the work and the method of filing for registration (you'll pay more if you don't use the online registration system,) but are between $35 and $85 in most situations.\n\n \n\nAnyone who holds any of the exclusive rights to the work is eligible to register the work.  Of course the original creator can register a work (as long as they haven\u2019t assigned the copyright to someone else), but if the original creator has granted an exclusive license to make derivative works to another, that is sufficient for that person to be able to register the work.  (Remember, the copyright in works made in the course of regular employment is held by the employer, in this case the employee is not eligible to register the work.  In the case of joint authorship, any one of the creators can register.)  Only one registration is necessary per work.\n\n \n\nA registration is considered to have happened at the time that the Copyright Office receives your application.  After a few months you will receive a certificate of registration in the mail (this is the document that would have to be presented in court in order to file a lawsuit.)\n\n \n\nRegistration records back to January 1978 are publicly available and searchable on the Library of Congress website<\/a>.\n

Discovering Infringement<\/h1>\nIt is up to every creator or copyright holder to monitor for copyright infringement of their work.  There is no law enforcement office that exists to police this for you.  It would be an enormous, impossible task.  If you publish your work with an established company, it is possible (but by no means guaranteed) that they have both the resources and the motivation to monitor for copyright violations of your work and try to enforce your\/their rights.  If this is not the case it is up to you to discover instances of infringement and pursue appropriate remedies.\n\n \n\nGoogle (and frankly any search engine) can be a powerful tool in monitoring for infringement.  Of course Google can be used to search for text based materials.  Advances search techniques<\/a> are helpful here, for example, using quotation marks around a string of works tells Google that you only want to see results where these exact words appear in this exact order.  It is also relatively easy to use the Google Reverse Image Search<\/a> to find instances of your images being used across the internet.  Just click the little camera within the search box on the Google Images<\/a> search page in order to select an image URL or upload an image.\n\n \n\n\"\"\n\nYouTube also makes available to some content creators<\/a> a set of ContentID tools<\/a> that can be used to identify instances of a work being used by others on the platform.  YouTube is beta testing the idea of offering these tools to all creators, but these tools have also been widely criticized<\/a> for resulting in take downs of lawfully created videos (work that would likely qualify as fair use.)  More information on how YouTube handles copyright is available here<\/a>.\n

Cease & Desist<\/h1>\nWhether or not you have registered your work with the Copyright Office, if you discover someone engaging in activities that you feel infringe your copyrights, your first step is to send a cease and desist letter.  This letter should include:\n