Copyrights question

When I went on a short course covering debt-collection (getting a company who'd bought goods from our company to pay for them) it was stressed that getting judgement was just the start if the other party wanted to be sticky. You've still got to find some threat that will make them hand over the cash...turning up on the doorstep of the director with the heavies and a court order to distrain upon his goods was, IIRC, pretty late on in the options!

 

I don't know exactly where the line is, but I'm pretty sure there has to be an element of actual theft... like, if you had no way of knowing about my book and independently came up with it yourself, it wouldn't be plagiarism even if every word was identical.

 

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You want more then click on the links in my post above.

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ROTFLMAO

The law says to collect damages you must have registered your copyright.

You might win damages for some other reason but not copyright.

Yes registration is optional but it is mandatory to collect damages under the copyright law.

 

I thought I was the only person on the planet that would do something like this!

17 U.S.C. 411 - "no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title."

To sue, it is best just to register. This registration can occur after the infringement occurs. But registering a copyright "is a precondition to filing a claim." Section 411 "establishes a condition—copyright registration—that plaintiffs ordinarily must satisfy before filing an infringement claim and invoking the Act’s remedial provisions." (Elsevier v. Muchnick, slip opinion available at )

It is important to note that while Elsevier points out that 411 is a precondition to filing, the opinion "decline(s) to address whether §411(a)’s registration requirement is a mandatory precondition to suit that... district courts may or should enforce sua sponte by dismissing copyright infringement claims involving unregistered works."

So could you recover for unregistered copyrights? Maybe. Could a court dismiss it for lack of a precondition? Maybe.

Law. Hilarious stuff, really.

 

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You forgot the part that said to COLLECT statutory damages you must have registered.
I doubt any court would award damages without the registration.
If they did the appeal would be easy to win.

 

Right, but statutory damages aren't the only damages that can be awarded under a copyright claim. Keep in mind that there are many different awards that can be made, and 17 U.S.C. 504 differentiates statutory damages (504(c)), which are a court-determined award of $750 to $30,000, from Actual Damages and Profits (504(b)). So while you are correct, no one could collect statutory damages, that is not the only damages remedy available to them.

Again, let me emphasize that I am in no way an intellectual property lawyer, and that anyone with a question about a potential copyright claim should retain the services of an attorney in their jurisdiction. But from my (very brief, I'm not getting paid to do this) reading of the law and a couple of cases, if you could convince the court to not toss the case sua sponte because you didn't register your copyright, you could get actual damages and profits.

 

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True.

But they are the ones easiest to prove and collect on. Actual damages would need a lot of work and often they do not exist except in the mind of the plaintiff. And there is the fair use exemption which courts have ruled all over the place making that a crap shoot in too many cases. Libel and other claims are really not copyright related and are often iffier than beating a fair use defense.

 

Also important to realize that the vast majority of plagiarism these days, in my experience, is international. So if a US citizen wants to sue another US citizen for plagiarism that occurred in the US, registration is important. But that's a very, very limited subset of potential plagiarism.

 

Like anything in law, it all depends on the facts. I'd be willing to bet that there aren't a lot of people on this board, @BayView aside, that will have to deal with any sort of infringement, and certainly not enough to warrant any kind of action for damages. For me, this has been more of a hypothetical exercise, and a chance to stretch my legal muscles.

Actual damages, sure, difficult to prove. Profits, though, are pretty easy. If the plaintiff can establish infringement, they get to use gross revenue as the baseline for "profit," and it is up to the infringer to show what of that revenue was not income from the infringing work.

Fair use is... weird. God, have you been following the Star Trek fan show debacle? And I'm not sure why you would mention libel here. Because I agree, they are certainly not related to an intellectual property claim.

 

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You are claiming things with no proof. And as you noted UK implementation may be different than USA. I dont care squat about the UK.
What I said is part of USA law and I guarantee no court would ever award statutory damages when the law requires registration first.

 

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I fully realise the different types of damage claims.

The USA law says you can't collect statutory damages from past violations only those after it is registered.
That is why professional publishers and many others register their copyright immediately if they have any concerns about IP theft.