re: #301 buzzsawmonkey

No, you can’t “register the work the day before you walk into court,” because you need the certificate as an exhibit on the complaint. It can take the Copyright Office anywhere from 4 weeks to 6 months to process an application, depending on the examiners’ workload, unless you pay a hefty sum for special handling, in which case you can get the registration back in about a week. But you need the certificate for the complaint.

More to the point, if registration occurred after infringement, unless it was done within the magic 3-month window following the date of first legitimate publication, the delay in registering means, as I said above, that you cannot claim either attorney’s fees or statutory damages, but are limited to provable actual damages and the infringer’s profits.

Statutory damages—particularly statutory damages for willful infringement, which can go up to $150,000 per infringed work—can often be more than actual damages and profits, so losing that remedy reduces the recovery substantially.

The real loss, however, is the ability to claim attorney’s fees, because if one cannot recover attorney’s fees from the infringer the costs of litigation can quickly eat up the lion’s share of a potential recovery.

Wow. Dude.

1) You’re being a bit literal about registering before court. I think you know what I mean: Whether it’s a day or a week, registration only must be made before bringing the case to court. Not before violation. Not before publication. Et cetera.

2) Yes, as noted long ago, we agree on statutory damages. My point has never been about statutory damages. Merely that registration is not a prerequisite to valid copyright.

Copy?

Right?