Nothing hurts more than someone else receiving credit for work into which you placed your heart and sweat. A range of emotions may overcome you because someone else is getting credit, and maybe even money, for work that you created. So what can you do? What remuneration can you receive for someone else's use of your work? This is where copyright registration comes into play.
First, let's get some things off the table.
You cannot hold a copyright for speaking a thought or having a thought out loud. The idea has to be in some fixed form.
You may have the same idea as someone else and you both have no idea about the other. There has to be some proof that there was the opportunity for one to copy the other.
Just because it is an original idea, does not mean that the idea can be registered with the US Copyright Office. Sometimes, you have to resolve to register the idea with the USPTO as a trademark or just keep it a trade secret.
You'd be surprised to know that recipes cannot be registered. You can register a recipe book, however, the recipes in the book cannot be stand alone registrations.
Now that we have handled that, let's go into why you should register your copyright. When someone copies your original idea, there are legal courses of action that you can take; whether the subject matter is registered or not.
If you do not register your copyright, yet can prove that your fixed idea was copied, you can sue and ask for an injunction preventing the infringer from continued use of your work. That's it. You can make then stop using your work and be happy with that.
If, however, you want a little more from your complaint, you need to have your work registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. With the registration, you can not only ask the court to make them stop using your work, you can also ask for damages. Damages, in other words, is money. In certain cases, there are also criminal repercussions for copyright violations. Either way, however, without that registration, those avenues of redress are not available.
So what forms of work can be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office? Here's a short list:
Blog posts
beats
musical compositions
books
visual works of art
photographs
websites
computer programs
stage plays
scripts
If you have any of these forms of works in your office/house or stored on your computer, feel free to give my office a call to discuss the types of protections that are available to you for your creativity. You are not any less of a purist regarding your work for ensuring your original work is not credited to someone else. Starving artists have to eat or else there is a reason why they are no longer starving, if you know what I mean.
With that being said, let's end on a much happier note. Here is an instance where having a copyright registration worked out well for the Plaintiff (the person suing):
John Fogerty v. John Fogerty
"One of the strangest cases ever conducted. Fogerty used to be part of a band called Creedence Clearwater Revival, or CCR, and wrote the song "Run Through the Jungle." 15 years later, Fogerty was no longer part of the band and he released the song "The Old Man Down the Road." The label for CCR sued him for copyright infringement. After one of the most interesting arguments in legal history, where Fogerty brought his guitar to court and demonstrated how the songs were different, the court rule they weren't the same song. He then countersued the label, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and he won, creating a legal precedent!" Landmark Cases, Musicians Institute Library (September 20, 2024, 11:23am), https://library.mi.edu/musiccopyright/currentcases.
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