Copyright Registration Issues

Afraid to Talk About This… Honestly..

Why? Because so many writers are so uninformed, they think they need to “copyright” a work before they have protection.

Uhhh, no, copyright protection is automatic when you put a creative work into a form. If you have a desire to be a writer, learn copyright.

But there are reasons to register copyright. Especially here in the US.

Kris and I have made it a long practice to register every work that is getting sniffed at by movies or television or streaming or gaming.

But a lot of our novels and short stories, we have not registered. (For you uninformed out there, that does not mean those stories and novels are not protected by copyright law… sigh… Registration is not a requirement for copyright protection in any country under the Berne Copyright Convention.)

US registration, boiled down to so simple as to be silly, gives you a few things here in the US. It give notice to others (in theory but not in any real practice) and under US law, if you register the copyright in a timely fashion, you get what are called “statutory damages” meaning you do not have to prove you were damaged in a theft. You also have to register before you can file a suit.

Those damages can get stupidly expensive for someone who thinks they can just take your work and use it.

So thanks to the new copyright thieves that have come onto the scene, I have been doing a bunch of research into registration, an area of the copyright law I seldom paid much attention to. Mostly I wanted to find out if you could register a collection of single-author stories, would that one registration give statutory damage protection to all the stories in the collection.

Answer… If you do it right and only if certain restrictions are met. Sigh… Sounds like the government, doesn’t it?

— A registration of a collection gives damages if done timely for the form of the collection, not the stories inside the collection.

You can, under one fee, group a bunch of stories together if done by the same author and a few other things, IF THEY ARE UNPUBLISHED.

So otherwise, on published stories, you have to register them all one-at-a-time. I have upwards of 500 or more published short stories, about 20 of them are registered. So that is a non-starter.  (Again, they are all protected, just not registered…)

So Kris and I will continue on with our normal registration practice that has served us very well over the decades. But I was so hoping for a different outcome in my research into that stupidly-stupid area of copyright law.

Sorry, writers, that I didn’t have a better answer.