re: #220 lawhawk

If I am following this the point could be that if you have an unregistered copyright it means that the other guy can’t get away with suing for damages over it. Say you wrote something and it is know to 20 people, then one of them who saw it on a blog, publishes it under their own name claiming it was their wit and wisdom and then the NY Times uses it without attribution. You have real damages against the first thief for the money they made from your idea but not punitive damages because it wasn’t registered. If they sue the times they have no standing because they didn’t really own it, the Times may owe you or you could sue to get anything the Times paid the first thief. Am I right?

Similar to when Apple sued Microsoft but it turned out the ideas were really from Xerox.