Copyright Talk

Need a how-to lesson? Here you go -

When you create a work, in the US you automatically have a copyright in that work. You do not need to do anything to have the copyright. However, if you want to put the world on notice that you have this copyright, you must register your work with the US Copyright Office. The basic registration fee is $45 for each registration, but in many cases you can include more than one work at a time in the same registration. The Copyright Office has separate forms for specific types of works, and you can get them here. In addition to the registration form, you must provide a copy of the work to the Office. The type of copy depends on the type of work you’re registering, and is explained on the registration form.

Copyright registration is very much a do-it-yourself project, but you’ll find lots of services out there willing to do it for you, for a small fee, of course. Whether you want to use one of these services or not is entirely up to you, but you should know that there is nothing tricky, “legal”, or complicated about registration that would require help form someone else. Filing trademarks are a little more complicated, and many people do in fact benefit from hiring services to help them. Same for patent filings, which is such a different and complicated animal that you should really, in most cases, have an attorney helping you.

But copyright registration is not that way. So if you are thinking about using a service, be sure that you are getting something useful for the extra money you’ll spend.

There are some questions that you might have when filling out the registration forms (like “do I have a co-author?”) but the questions that might come up are pretty easy to find answers to, usually on the Copyright Office website itself, or you can find all kinds of useful and reliable information by searching the internet.

And one last note: mailing yourself a copy of the work has no legal significance. If you need a copyright registration, spend the $45 and register it properly.