re: #149 buzzsawmonkey

You are wrong.

Copyright being “automatic with authorship” merely means that you don’t lose the copyright if it’s published without registration, as was the case prior to 1978. No copyright can be enforced unless it is registered; the registration is your ticket into court. The half-truth that you don’t need to register for the copyright to (merely) exist has been responsible for many, many authors losing out on their remedies.

Whether you can claim statutory damages and/or attorney’s fees, or are limited to claiming provable actual damages and the infringer’s profits from the infringement depends on when the copyright was registered. If you register prior to infringement, or within 3 months of first publication (if that was a legitimate, not an infringing, publication), you can claim statutory damages and/or attorney’s fees; if you register post-infringement, you are barred from claiming statutory damages or attorney’s fees, and are limited to actual damages and profits.

Yes, that’s true about statutory damages. But copyright registration is an aid to collecting damages — handy proof, basically — but does not define copyright, and is not a condition of copyright. Copyright is fixed when the work itself is fixed in some way — to paper, to digital file, to tape, etc.

Yon could still claim enormous actual damages, if he proves his case — plenty enough to cause pain to Moore.