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From: Peter Duniho on 21 Sep 2009 20:11 On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:52:34 -0700, Martin Gregorie <martin(a)address-in-sig.invalid> wrote: > On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:54:08 -0700, Peter Duniho wrote: > >> Typically, a copyrighted work is published in some way, and the owner of >> the copyright knows how it was published and can document that they in >> fact were the original publisher. It's that documentation, and not the >> copyright notice itself, that provides support for a copyright ownership >> claim. >> > Yes, that's clear and is a good reason for registering copyright. > > However, the FAQ also says there's no need for the copyright notice or > for registering. Would this leave you in deep doo-doo if you omitted to > do both, left out the author's name as well and then tried to have > somebody for plagiarism who'd added their own name and published it as > theirs. Sure. It's the US legal system. There are all sorts of ways justice might fail to be served. But _typically_, if your copyrighted content got out in the open where someone else could plagiarize it, that would happen in a way that could be documented. Note that whether you put a copyright notice on the work or not, you have the same problem. The copyright notice on the work itself doesn't really help much, because without being able to document the validity of the copyright notice, you're back to the same issue. After all, even if you put a copyright notice on your work, if you don't publish it in a documentable way, but someone else gets access to the work, they can just replace your notice with their own or remove it altogether. Seems to me that the "gold standard", if there is one, with respect to documenting copyright protection would be to register with the Copyright Office. Even that could be contested in court, but it would take some specific documentation to the contrary to overturn the registration. > If they hired a lawyer I'd imagine you'd have problems, or did I > misunderstand something? As soon as anyone hires a lawyer, someone's got problems. I do not think you misunderstand that point at all. :) Pete |