Tag: copyright registration

So okay, the Supreme Court just issued a narrow but extremely important case on copyright registration. It’s called Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com and you can read it here: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/fourth-estate-public-benefit-corp-v-wall-street-com/

In a nutshell what happened was this: A content producer called “Fourth Estate,” clever journalism reference et cetera, licensed some articles to a website called “Wall-Street.com.” WSC canceled the license but left the articles up on their website. Putting the articles on the website without a license is (potentially) copyright infringement, and Fourth Estate sued them.

There is a rule in the US that for US-created works, you can’t sue for copyright infringement unless you’ve tried to register the copyright on the work and the Copyright Office has either issued the copyright certificate or has refused to register the copyright. (We’ll get into that in a minute.) Fourth Estate had not registered the copyrights on the works, so they couldn’t sue. Not a problem: they just need to register the works and then, off to the courthouse. The damages would be retroactive, and we’ll get into that later.

HOWEVER.

NOTE: I am an attorney, but nothing in this article should be read as specific legal advice. While the information in this article is accurate to the best of the author’s knowledge and belief at the time of publication, laws and regulations change frequently and individual circumstances vary. Please consult an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction and familiar with the relevant law before making legal decisions.

There are many articles and books on how to file copyright registrations. However, most of them seem to go into a lot of unnecessary depth and/or off on extended explanatory or historical tangents. Which is understandable: Copyright law is pretty complicated, and it’s also very interesting to the sort of person who writes such books and articles. I am the king of unnecessary depth and going off on tangents, and I am casting no aspersions.

But, I thought it might be nice to have a really simple, streamlined checklist for copyrighting an e-book comprising original authorship. So here it is. If you follow these steps, you should be able to easily file a copyright registration for a single work of written fiction or nonfiction written solely by you.

Do not use this list for ANYTHING other than a single work of written fiction or nonfiction written solely by you! (Scripts, by the way, are not works of written fiction or nonfiction for purposes of the copyright law – they are “dramatic works.” If you’re registering a script, this list is not appropriate.) Also, if the work has previously been published in print or in some other work, you should not use this list.

All caveats herein notwithstanding, the Copyright Office’s website is reasonably easy to use, and a person of reasonable intelligence can most likely figure out how to register most kinds of works with the instructions on the site and possibly a little Googling. I am not trying to dissuade such persons. I am only saying that the second you diverge from the parameters I set forth, you can no longer just follow the steps below as I lay them out.

Okay, here we go!

Continue reading A Tangent-Free Checklist For Electronically Copyrighting Ebooks.