Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldjensens
Your copywrite is automatic. However you need to prove you wrote it and that you wrote it first. The safest way to do that is to register your work with the copyright office. However you can also put a draft in registered mail to yourself and never open it when it arrives. That will be some proof of the date you wrote it.
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This is true.
Both will protect you as the author, but registration becomes part of the public record and makes you the official author of your work. That is enough to stop a frivolous lawsuit.
But you could be forced to go to court to defend your authorship if you don't register your copy right. The self-addressed envelope will be good evidence, but yohe u will still end up paying out a lot of money and spending a lot of time in court.
Registration stops that expense and waste of time. The only successful offense against registration is earlier registration by the plaintiff.
There are jerks out there who hunt daily for un-registered logos, works, and trade names.
If they can register them first, a company could be forced to pay millions for a trade name that the company invented.
Exxon is a notable example.
When Standard Oil decided to drop its registered trade names 'Standard' and 'Esso', because they wanted to combine the brands under one name, they hired a major advertising company to come up with a new name, logo, and ad campaign.
Millions were invested in research, as the new name had to be a meaningless word all over the world. Standard Oil wanted no inadvertent bad connotations with their new name.
Exxon was chosen. It was an invented word, and no known language in the world had it. The two Xs made it visually memorable, and harkened back to the two Ss in 'Esso'.
A perfect choice. After 2 years in development, the new brand name was proudly announced to the media.
...and some guy in New Jersey caught the bus to New York City, where he did a quick check at the district records office there.
He discovered that somehow, the agency had forgotten to copy right all the work they did, so he copy righted it all, using the backs of registration forms to write on.
The work took about 30 minutes and cost him around $200 to copy right it all. And he was paid over $2.5 million just to get him off Standard Oil's back shortly afterward.
That happens to literature too.
New authors aren't sued very often, but once an author becomes famous, it's the stuff that was written back in the early days that's used the most in lawsuits.