Copyright protection arises when you create an ORIGINAL WORK OF AUTHORSHIP and fix it in a tangible medium of expression.

So, while copyright does not protect plain ideas or concepts, it will protect the content you create on a webpage or in an eBook.  Also, software can be protected by copyright laws.

This protection actually is created automatically as soon as the work is created and fixed into a medium fo the first time.  What this means is that once you place your content into a web site program or on our computer. . . or once you write your eBook content and save it into a computer file, your work has US copyright protection.

WHY AND WHEN SHOULD YOU REGISTER COPYRIGHTS (IF REGISTRATION IS NOT NECESSARY TO RECEIVES THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT)?

While copyright registration is not required to obtain protection for your website content and ebooks, it is required before you can sue anyone to enforce those rights. In other words, if you find that someone else is unlawfully copying and using your content or distributing your eBooks, you cannot file a lawsuit against them unless your copyright is registered.

There are additional benefits for registering your copyright early.  If you register a work within 3 months of the time you make it available to the public, you will have the right to statutory damages, legal costs and attorneys fees.  This is a huge benefit as statutory damages can be very high especially if the infringing party is acting intentionally (known as willful infringement) and as we all know, attorneys fees can become very expensive.

Practically, having a registration is very powerful as a preventative weapon.  You can likely get an infringing party to stop immediately by delivering a strong letter letting them know that your content is copyright registered which means that their action are willful due and they will be liable for significant statutory damages and you legal fees to enforce it.

BOTTOM LINE

Copyright registration is not expensive and for written content, it is a fairly straightforward process.  You can go to www.copyright.gov for more details.

While it is not necessary to copyright register every single work of authorship you have in your business, you should consider registration for those works that bring or are related to bringing in significant income into you business.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the law that provides copyright owners with remedies if their works/content are being used unlawfully on an Internet site.  While there are some administrative requirements to exercising remedies, the main requirement is that the copyright owner believe in good faith that its content is being misappropriated.

In a recent United States district court, an additional requirements has been added before a copyright owner can utilize the DMCA. Basically, the court ruling states that under the DMCA, a copyright owner must first evaluate whether the use of the material is a fair use of the copyright PRIOR to demanding that copyrighted material be removed from an Internet site. The court held that a copyright owner acted in bad faith by issuing a takedown notice without proper consideration of the fair use doctrine.

Unfortunately, fair use is a fact based inquiry and so it is not always easy to determine whether or not a use is fair use (even for a trained intellectual property lawyer).  In this case, the court acknowledged that there is no bright-line rule with respect to what constitutes “fair use” of copyrighted material.  Factors to consider in making this determination include (1) how much of the original work was reproduced; (2) whether the new use is commercial in nature; (3) whether the market for the original work was harmed; and (4) whether the new work is a parody.

Copyright infringement on the Internet is a rapidly growing problem because it is so easy to copy and publish material.  This case clearly adds another hurdle to enforcement which can be costly if a copyright owner needs to hire a lawyer to assess fair use.  However, the court ruling makes sense given that fair use is an established and protected use of copyright material in the US.

The Internet is fundamentally based on the creation of a widespread and viral method of sharing information and most information posted on the Internet is FREE. Despite this, the content posted by anyone on the Internet is protected by copyright laws.

Republishing or otherwise copying any articles or other content without the permission of the owner constitutes copyright infringement.  In layman’s terms, it is unlawful so do not do it.

There are some limited exceptions such as the fair use doctrine which is a complicated area of the law.

Bottom line (and the practical advice here_ is that if you are thinking about copying content available on the Internet to benefit your site or your business, you should not do it unless there is permission granted already, you obtain that permission from the author or you are very comfortable it falls under a defense such as fair use.

Courts have even stated that copyright protection applies even if content is written in a PUBLIC DISCUSSION FORUM.