Category Archives: Copyright Basics

Copyright Registration Part 1:
Why Register Your Copyright?

Posted February 14, 2018

Under today’s copyright laws, copyright protection for original, creative works is automatic from the moment the work is “fixed in a tangible medium” (e.g., as soon as the author puts pen to paper, paintbrush to canvas, or saves a computer file). Although authors do not need to register their works in order to enjoy the protection of copyright law, registration has several benefits which make it an advantageous practice.

In this first article in a two-part series, we outline some of the benefits of registering your copyrights. Next week, we’ll explain how to register your works with the U.S. Copyright Office.

Copyright registration is a claim to copyright filed with the Copyright Office which creates a public record of facts about a copyrighted work, including authorship and ownership information. Copyright registration includes three essential elements: a completed application form, a filing fee, and a “deposit” (a copy of the work submitted to the Copyright Office). We’ll cover those steps in more detail in next week’s post on how to register copyrights. Authors, their agents, and owners of an exclusive right in a work can register a copyright. Often, but not always, if you are publishing your work, your publisher will register the work for you—but it is best to check, especially if you are retaining your copyright or publishing with a smaller press. If you are self-publishing your work, it will be up to you (or your agent) register the copyright to your work.

Registration can be made at any time within the life of copyright, but some benefits of registration are contingent upon timely filing, as described below.

Registration Establishes a Public Record of Ownership

Registering your work—and recording subsequent transfers of ownership—creates a record of copyright ownership that allows the public to identify and locate copyright owners. This benefits both authors and the public, and it helps prevent works from becoming orphans. Ownership records enable would-be users of works to locate the copyright owner in order to ask for permission or a license to make uses that are within the copyright owner’s exclusive rights, to provide attribution to the author, or to discover when a work is in the public domain. In the absence of a public record of copyright ownership, would-be users of a work may not know whom to contact, and may abandon potential onward uses of your work. This means that you could lose revenue from licensing opportunities and miss out on the chance to grant permission for uses which you would welcome (even without payment); consequently, your work may not have the vibrant life you hoped for in years to come.

Flora Foxglove retained all of the copyrights to her book of gardening tips and registered the work with the Copyright Office. Horace Horticulture wants to copy and share the book with his community gardening class, so he searches the Copyright Office’s records to find out how to contact Flora. He sends a request to Flora’s PO Box, asking for her permission to copy and distribute her work with his students. Delighted to share gardening know-how with budding enthusiasts, Flora gives Horace her permission to reproduce the work so long as he includes her name on the copies.

Blaine Blockbuster thinks that a movie adaptation of Betsy Bestseller’s latest novel would make the next Hollywood hit. He searches the Copyright Office’s records, and finds that Percy Publisher owns all of the exclusive rights in the work. Blaine contacts Percy and negotiates for a license to make a movie adaptation of the novel.

Registration is Necessary Before Initiating an Infringement Suit

In addition to facilitating downstream uses of a work, registration gives you additional rights in the event that your work is infringed. In fact, registration is a necessary precursor to a copyright infringement lawsuit: If someone uses your work in a way that you think infringes on your copyright and you want to initiate a copyright infringement lawsuit, you must register your copyright before you can do so.

Registration Within Five Years of Publication Provides Favorable Presumptions

If a work is registered before or within five years of publication, registration brings with it the presumption that the work is copyrightable and that the facts stated in the registration certificate are true. This may include information such as the name of the author, the name of the copyright owner, the title of the work, the date the work was published, and the effective date of registration. This means that in an infringement suit, if your registration was timely, the burden of proving your copyright is invalid will fall on the defendant. If you do not register within five years of publication, you can still do so, but how much weight a court will give the facts stated in the registration is at its discretion.

Registration Within Three Months of Publication, or Prior to Infringement of the Work, Opens Up the Possibility of Statutory Damages and Attorneys’ Fees

If registration is made within three months of publication of the work, or prior to the infringement of the work, statutory damages (predetermined payments established by law) and attorneys’ fees are available to the copyright owner in the event of an infringement lawsuit. Statutory damages typically range from $750 to $30,000 per infringed work (though they can be as high as $150,000 per infringed work for willful infringement, or as low as $200 where the infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe the use was infringing.) Timely registration also allows you to request reimbursement of your attorneys’ fees and costs of filing the lawsuit. If you do not register your work prior to the infringement or within three months of publication, your remedy in an infringement action is limited to the actual damages you suffered from the infringement (and any of the infringer’s additional profits that are attributable to the infringement), as well as injunctive relief (e.g., a court order restraining the defendant from copying the work).

Last updated February 13, 2018.

We are grateful to Allison Davenport, former Authors Alliance Research Assistant, for her help with researching and drafting this post.

Resource Roundup: The Public Domain

Posted January 15, 2018

public domain image courtesy of the Library of Congress

The first day of Copyright Week is dedicated to the public domain and creativity. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the most recent Public Domain Day, which took place on January 1. On that date, a host of works entered the public domain in Canada, New Zealand, and Europe, as detailed here. But due to copyright term extensions that went into effect in 1998, those of us in the United States have been in a public domain drought for decades. We’ll have to wait until 2019 to freely access many works first published in 1923—almost 100 years ago.

Although some works first published in the United States in or after 1923 may already be in the public domain as a result of failure to comply with formalities, and some unpublished works may also be in the public domain, it can be devilishly difficult to determine when this is the case. We recommend Peter Hirtle’s Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States and Berkeley Law’s “Is it in the Public Domain?” Handbook to help you evaluate a work’s copyright status.

We at Authors Alliance are already looking forward to next January 1, when all works first published in the United States in 1923 will (finally) enter the public domain in the United States and become “free as the air to common use.” Read why in Molly Van Houweling’s post on how the public domain benefits authors.

In the meantime, check out Public Domain Review’s Guide for thorough guidance on how to find public domain works online.

Notice and Takedown and Academic Digital Libraries

Posted August 8, 2017

photo by Redd Angelo | CC0

Prior to joining Authors Alliance as Executive Director earlier this year, Brianna Schofield was the Clinical Teaching Fellow at UC Berkeley Law’s Samuelson Clinic, where she co-authored an article with Jennifer M. Urban, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law, examining academic libraries’ experiences with notice and takedown. Takedown and Today’s Academic Digital Library has now been published by Ohio State University Moritz College of Law’s I/S Journal of Law and Policy. We share a summary of the article below, and invite readers who are interested in learning more to access the full article here.

In recent years, academic libraries and archives have increasingly used digital means to preserve materials and provide access to users, allowing them to serve more diverse, and much more far-flung, populations. For example, libraries and archives are increasingly digitizing collections with unique or rare material that otherwise has limited circulation in order to improve long-term preservation and expand access to cultural heritage. The growth of online scholarship repositories and sharing sites, where academic authors post papers for wide access, is another central development. The evolution and the dissemination of academic works from print collections to open digital forms is widely heralded as increasing access to academic knowledge and fueling research.

Academic libraries have emerged as key players in the move to open access and are rapidly developing platforms that provide digital access to scholarship. As libraries and archives increasingly move into the online open access space, they are thrust more directly into debates over the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512 notice and takedown regime than they have been in the past. Section 512’s safe harbor from copyright liability is aimed at online services that host material contributed by others; however, libraries did not often host material posted by others and were therefore unlikely to be eligible for this protection. Newer institutional open-access repositories, on the other hand, may hold many works placed there by third parties, usually authors. These author-directed postings to institutional repositories may put academic libraries into the role of host, thus bringing them under the aegis of the formal notice and takedown system created by the DMCA.

Using survey questions and interviews, Schofield and Urban examined academic libraries’ interactions with both DMCA and non-DMCA takedown notices. They found that academic libraries most commonly receive non-DMCA takedown requests that are based on non-copyright issues (such as privacy) or that target materials the library itself placed online. In general, libraries have well-developed norms and practices in place to manage these types of requests to remove material.

They also found, however, that formal DMCA notices directed to libraries have historically been rare, but that this may be changing as open-access repositories hosted by libraries grow. Library respondents worried that an increase in DMCA takedown requests could result in valuable scholarship being removed from online repositories, thus limiting libraries’ ability to fulfill their missions to preserve and disseminate knowledge. In tracing the recent experience of academic libraries that have received DMCA takedown notices targeting materials in open access repositories, Schofield and Urban found that libraries have not yet developed norms and practices for addressing these requests.

To help libraries effectively manage increased takedown requests while maintaining publishers’ ability to monitor content made available in online repositories, Schofield and Urban recommend that:

Academic libraries should continue to educate authors about author-friendly publishing practices, and authors should retain more control of their own works.
Publishers, authors, and academic libraries should take steps to make the terms of publication agreements transparent.
Academic libraries should continue to support—and authors should embrace—open access policies.
Academic libraries should consider developing shared norms and best practices for DMCA notice handling similar to those they have developed for non-DMCA requests.
Academic institutions should ensure that librarians receive any DMCA notices targeting library materials that are sent to DMCA agents in other departments, and that library-developed best practices are followed in handling these notices.
Publishers should develop and publicly communicate reasonable notice-sending policies.
Publishers should ensure that third-party rights enforcement organizations, if used, comply with publisher notice-sending policies.
Academic libraries should consider creating educational materials about the counter notice process and tools that make it easy for authors whose works are challenged to send counter notices if their content is inappropriately targeted for takedown.

For more information about Schofield and Urban’s findings and recommendations, we invite you to read Takedown and Today’s Academic Digital Library.

Authors Alliance Submits Comments in Support of Modernization Efforts at the U.S. Copyright Office

Posted July 17, 2017

Today, Authors Alliance submitted comments in response to the United States Copyright Office’s recent Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Modernizing Copyright Recordation. By reducing the barriers to recording transfers of copyright ownership and submitting notices of termination, the proposed rules lay the foundation for improved copyright ownership records and make it easier for authors to exercise their termination rights.

We fully support these goals, which would not only help authors increase the compensation for and dissemination of their own works, but also make it easier for others to find accurate information about the rights in a given work and therefore reduce the number of works likely to become “orphans.” We also suggested that the Office consider:

providing better incentives for rights holders to record transfers of copyright ownership;
providing incentives to record transfers by operation of law;
strengthening incentives to keep ownership contact information accurate and up to date;
providing a mechanism to record diligent search data for orphan works;
reducing fees for electronic submission of documents; and
hiring technologists and economists to support modernization efforts.

Further details can be found in the full text of our comment. Hover over the document below to view the comment in your browser, or download here.

20170717_ModernizingCopyrightRecordation_FINAL

DMCA Takedown Notices: Know Your Rights

Posted June 22, 2017

photo by Alex Rodríguez Santibáñez | CC0

Last week, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices targeting APA articles on 80 university websites in an attempt to restrict unauthorized use of submissions to APA journals. In some cases, this resulted in the removal of academic authors’ articles from personal websites and university repositories. In response to the outcry from authors, the APA altered its pilot program to focus on removing articles from piracy sites rather than also targeting individual authors. APA also reiterated that authors may post their pre-print submissions (not the final version as published by an APA journal), as per their publication agreements with the APA.

This is not the first time that a journal publisher has targeted academic articles on university websites with DMCA takedown notices. In 2013, Elsevier, publisher of nearly 2,000 research journals, began sending takedown notices to individual researchers and universities targeting articles posted on university-hosted pages. Like the APA, Elsevier distinguished between authors posting the final versions of articles from those posting earlier versions.

Although these publishers may have acted within their rights to send these takedown notices, for authors looking to share work broadly, it is hard to imagine a situation more frustrating than not being being able to share their own works. In the face of the possibility that DMCA takedown notices targeting institutional repositories may increase, what can authors do?

Review the terms of your publishing agreement: Many journal publishing agreements allow for journal authors to self-archive pre-print versions of their articles on personal websites, university repositories, and author networking sites (sometimes with an embargo period). Check the terms of your agreement to see whether this is permitted, and, if so, replace your article with an allowed version.

Review your institution’s open access policy: If your institution has an open access policy, it may allow you to deposit a copy of your work in your institutional repository without infringing on your publisher’s rights. If in doubt, check with your institution’s Copyright or Scholarly Communications Office.

Retain the rights you need to make future works available in the ways you want: When presented with a publishing contract, review the terms of the contract and don’t be shy about negotiating for terms that allow you to share your work on personal websites, university repositories, and author networking sites. For more information on how to negotiate with your publisher to allow you to share your work, see Chapter 6 of our guide to Understanding Open Access. You can also review journal publishers’ standard policies regarding self-archiving on the SHERPA/RoMEO database and opt to submit your work to journals that give you more control of your work.

Reach out to your institution’s Copyright or Scholarly Communications Office: Copyright and scholarly communications staff can help you understand what rights you retained in your publication agreement, whether any version of your work can be posted online, and whether a copy can be uploaded to your institution’s repository. They can also help you understand your publishing contract before you sign.

For more information, check out our FAQ on copyright, which outlines some of the ways that authors can manage their copyrights in innovative ways, including with regard to academic journals. And our guide to Understanding Open Access provides even more detail about OA publication strategies.

“A Good Guy Offering a Good Product at a Fair Price”:
Cory Doctorow on Fair Trade E-books, Publishing, Copyright, and the Optimism of Disaster

Posted May 9, 2017

portrait of Cory Doctorow by Jonathan Worth | CC BY-SA 2.0

As part of our mission to empower authors in the digital age, Authors Alliance encourages authors to embrace new strategies for publishing and ensuring the ongoing lifespan of their work, both in print and in digital formats. Best-selling novelist, blogger, and Authors Alliance founding member Cory Doctorow epitomizes this innovative spirit in myriad ways. We sat down recently with Cory for a wide-ranging talk about his newly-launched platform for selling fair trade ebooks, the pros and cons of traditional publishing, and his brand-new novel, Walkaway.

AUTHORS ALLIANCE: At the London Book Fair this past March, you announced your new model for selling fair trade ebooks, affectionately known as “Shut Up and Take My Money.” What was your inspiration for this new platform? How does it address some of the issues with traditional retailing?

CORY DOCTOROW: There are ongoing disputes among publishers and writers about the equitable way to share ebook royalties. I kept hearing from people in publishing that hell would freeze over before publishers would pay 50% instead of 25% for ebook royalties. Now, “never ever” is a long time, and things do change, but if this is a thing you want to feed your kids with, you shouldn’t hold your breath. I got started by retailing my own audiobooks on my website with a modest shopping cart program after I had been kicked out of the traditional audiobook market by refusing to agree to DRM [digital rights management, which controls users’ access to, and use of, copyrighted material]. When I sell my audiobooks directly on my website, I get paid twice: I get the retail cut, as well as the royalty from my publisher, which is pretty damn close to 50%. The same is true for the ebook fair trade model: if you sell an ebook on your website, the royalty plus your retail cut is close to 50%.

There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.

Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.

So I thought, “What can I do to accommodate the CC books and the non-CC books that will maximally benefit all the entities here, and play within the Realpolitik of these regulatory settlements?” And I came up with this fair trade ebooks idea.

Authors Alliance Submits Comments on Moral Rights to the U.S. Copyright Office

Posted March 30, 2017

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

Today, Authors Alliance submitted comments in response to the U.S. Copyright Office’s study of moral rights. We support creators’ rights to integrity and attribution (subject to some limitations and exceptions that protect downstream creative reuse), and we believe that these non-economic authorial rights should be formally recognized in U.S. copyright law—as they are in many other countries. We also encourage the Copyright Office to consider recognizing other non-economic author rights, namely, the right to revive one’s work if it is no longer available commercially and the right to revise one’s work over time.

Hover over the document below to view in your browser, or download here. We will continue our series of posts on moral rights in the coming weeks and will keep our readers up to date on developments at the Copyright Office.

AuthorsAlliance_MoralRightsComment

A Case For Recognizing Attribution and Integrity as Authorial Rights

Posted March 22, 2017

“Author from BL Harley 4425, f. 133” by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is licensed under PDM 1.0

The following is a guest post by Authors Alliance President Pamela Samuelson. We welcome your comments as we continue to explore the topic of moral rights over the coming weeks.

In preparing Authors Alliance’s forthcoming comments in response to the Copyright Office’s Notice of Inquiry for its Study on the Moral Rights of Attribution and Integrity, I thought of eight reasons why it is in the interest of authors as well as the public for authorial attribution and integrity to be statutorily recognized in U.S. copyright law, as they are in the laws of virtually every other nation on earth.

First and foremost, many authors care deeply about having their names associated with the works they create and about their works being available to the public in the form in which their creators authorized dissemination. These authors experience lack of attribution and mutilation of their works as significantly injurious to their well-being.

Second, statutory recognition of attribution and integrity interests would send an important signal to the public about the respect that members of Congress have for the myriad contributions that authors make to the ongoing “progress of Science,” consonant with the constitutional clause under which Congress enacts copyright laws.

Third, recognition of authorship attribution and work integrity is in the public interest insofar as members of the public care about the authenticity of creative works with which they interact. Readers, viewers, and listeners want reassurance that the works to which they have access were created by specific individuals and have been vetted by the authors as the works authorized for public dissemination. For example, someone who has read several William Gibson novels and just purchased another will want to see Gibson’s name on the cover and be assured that the book just purchased is in the form the author wanted to reach his readers.

Fourth, being attributed as a work’s author and being able to control the integrity of one’s work is important to building and maintaining authorial reputations. Although it is often difficult to quantify the value to authors of reputation enhancement by virtue of public dissemination of their works, the value is real and meaningful to authors. It is indeed akin to the goodwill that firms build up over time associated with trademarks as the public comes to trust products or services bearing the protected mark.

Authors Alliance Submits Comments Regarding the U.S. Copyright Office to the House Judiciary Committee

Posted January 31, 2017

Today, Authors Alliance submitted comments to the House Judiciary Committee in response to an initial proposal by Representatives Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and John Conyers (D-MI) to reform the U.S. Copyright Office. The Committee invited comment on four proposed reforms intended to reorganize the office, bolster expertise, modernize technology infrastructure, and allow for pursuit of small claim infringements.

We applaud the Judiciary Committee for soliciting stakeholder input on these important issues, and we will continue to monitor developments at the Copyright Office and keep our members up to date as the Office seeks a new Register of Copyrights and works to implement reforms. The full text of our comments may be read below:

Posted January 16, 2017

It’s copyright week! This week, Authors Alliance is joining a group of organizations in reflecting on some of the principles that help make copyright law an engine of creativity.

The public domain—the realm of works not subject to copyright restrictions—is a vital part of our creative system, providing the shared history, raw material, and expressive freedom essential to authorship and intellectual inquiry. It is worth celebrating and protecting, as Authors Alliance noted in our Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform. In that document, we wrote that the law should “recognize the interests of both authors and the public in the public domain.” We elaborated:

The public domain . . . is critical to the scholarly and creative activities of authors. For too long, the law has ignored the importance of works in the public domain as essential building blocks for new creations. Copyright law should expressly recognize the public domain and the interests of authors and the public in its continued existence. Moreover, the law should recognize the public domain as inviolable: once made free to all, works and ideas should not again be subject to restrictions imposed by copyright law, by contracts, or by technology.

This bedrock principle is one we continue to support and are pleased to highlight this Copyright Week. Share our belief in the importance of the public domain to creative work? Join us as a member and show your support!