Copyright Registration – Protecting Your Investment
[by Richard Kelly]
With The Copyright Act of 1976 and later revisions including the Berne Convention, artists were no longer required to register for copyright nor to provide copyright notice. In my opinion, these two facts have led to two decades of visual artists thinking that they were protecting their visual investments. For a commercial artist, registering the work prior to delivery to a client insures, in situation whereby a client fails to pay, the artist can use the copyright registration as a means of getting paid. Any attorney would rather pay an invoice then to be hauled into Federal Court for copyright infringement. If the work was registered prior to infringement the artist may be entitled to attorneys fee’s in addition to statutory damages.
Another advantage is one I experienced a decade ago, when a publisher / client called me after he had published a series of musician portraits for a fashion story. He had discovered a local newsweekly had scanned the image from the magazine for an advertisement for a local nightclub featuring the singer’s band. He wanted to know what I was going to do to protect his “exclusive” image? I was able to resolve the situation by working with the infringing publication to publish an apology, but without the registration prior to the infringement I did not have as big a stick to collect any real money.
I am sure that we rarely think of our assignments as investments, but my clients spend “real” money to build a visual brand with my photographs and if I do not register the photographs, I am falling short of my professional obligation.
If you shoot stock, personal projects for fine art, books or multimedia projects not registering your work is similar to leaving your front door unlocked while on vacation with out insurance.
Registration counts.
