Discussion:
What is the name of your state?California
This question is involved... I began my site in 2000 and have the copyright date of 2000 on it. I printed out 150 plus pages in 2003 in order to register the copyright because of an infringement. These printed pages are all dated 2003. Before sending these pages to be registered, I decided to berate the thief and he erased all of my text that he stole. Now I want to go through with registering the copyright. But, some pages have changed a lot. Should I reprint just those pages with today's date? Or should I erase all the dates on pages so there will be less confusion? Or do I need to reprint them all with today's date? BTW, the site don't meet the criteria to be classified as a serial work since I don't always update within 3 months.
Thanks for any help!
Answer:
Whatever you send in is registered as a copyright.
It's your choice as to what you want to register with the copyright folks.
Answer:
Calilfornia
Thanks. Let me get this clarified a little more, please.
I'll take off all the dates on the print-outs. On the registration form, I will put "year work was completed" as now, 2005, and "date of first publication" as 2000. (Well, that is not totally clear to me since the work was finished in 2000, but I suppose using that date might leave everything added since then as not registered.) Question 1) should the copyright date on my site still say 2000 or should I then change it to 2000-2005? Or what? Question 2) With filling out the form with those dates, could I sue someone for compensation if they stole my work prior to 2005?
Sorry if I am making this too confusing.
Thanks again!
Answer:
Whatever you send in is registered as a copyright.
It's your choice as to what you want to register with the copyright folks. Yes, you are making it confusing; just re-read my answer.
Also, I guess you can sue anyone for anything at anytime for any reason. Whether you win or not is something I don't have a clue about.
Answer:
Still California.
I guess that means you don't know the answer to the date/posting/suing question.
Maybe someone else will.
Thanks, anyway.
Answer:
Still California.
I guess that means you don't know the answer to the date/posting/suing question.
Maybe someone else will.
Thanks, anyway. ....ok....
Answer:
No, seniorjudge was right -- whatever you send in is what is copyrighted. If you send in your site as it exists today, then the "date of completion" is the date the current website was completed -- in this case, probably 2005. You could fill out the form TX and claim that the site was a "derivative work" based on a 2003 or 2000 work, but the 2005 site will be "completed" in 2005.
Now, if you submit the 2005 site, and later change or modify the site in a significant way, then you casn resubmit as a deriative work based on the 2005 registration.
EDIT: But in this case, of course, the completion date of the 2006 work would be 2006. Completion date is the completion date of the work as a whole, not the individual parts.
With filling out the form with those dates, could I sue someone for compensation if they stole my work prior to 2005? It doesn't matter what the dates are -- if someone infringed prior to the copyright registration being granted, you can only recover your actual, provable damages. You can always sue, but unless the work is registered before the infringement occurs, all you can sue for is actual, provable damages, which is the amount you can prove to a court that you lost because of the infringement. Unless there was a large market for your work that was damaged or destroyed by the infringement, you will be very, very unlikely to recover enough damages to even cover your legal fees.
In the future, what you can do is file what is known as a "DMCA request," basically asking someone's ISP to remove allegedly infringing materials -- see 17 USC 512(c) (you can read it at ). In this case, because the materials are already gone, there really isn't much you can do.