Things every client should know about copyrights

Is it important to file the copyright application quickly?

While a copyright registration cannot be invalidated in the same ways a patent and / or trademark application can, it is nonetheless important to file a copyright application for a company’s important creative works with dispatch. This is so for several reasons.

First, and foremost, if a company inappropriately copies your work (thus infringing upon your copyright rights), they will have exposure to you for copyright infringement even if your work is unregistered. However, the Copyright Act confers substantial additional legal rights and benefits upon the owner of a registered work that can make suing, enjoining, and dealing with infringers much easier.

As an example, the Copyright Act provides an additional method for the calculation of damages for infringement (termed “statutory damages”) of a published work, and also provides for the recovery of attorney fees, but these remedies are only available for infringement of a registered work unless registration is made within three months of first publication of the work. Thus, the Copyright Act rewards companies who promptly register their works either prior to or within three months of first publication of the work.

Second, these benefits are made all the more exciting when consideration is given to the fact that copyright registration applications are, as a general rule, far less expensive to prepare and file than patent and / or trademark applications. Truly, copyright registration applications provide an extraordinary amount of “bang for your buck” in the way of intellectual property rights.