So I’m a big believer in the value that registration requirements create. Copyright law is the ONLY federal IP regulation that doesn’t have mandatory registration. But as EFF‘s Jason Schultz points out to me in an email, HR 4077 is about to make registration even less useful:
Don’t know if you saw this, but the MPAA/RIAA’s new copyright bills, HR 4077 (passed by the House, awaiting vote in the Senate) makes two significant changes to what little remains of copyright formalities in the US:
1) Section 602:
“A certificate of registration shall satisfy the requirements of this section and section 412 irrespective of any inaccurate information therein …”
— in order words, you don’t even have to have an accurate registration anymore in order to sue for infringement. Potentially, you could even make knowing misrepresentations in your form. So much for fair and public notice.
2) Section 603:
“Section 504(c)(1) of title 17, United States Code, is amended in the second sentence by inserting before the period ��, except that the court in its discretion may determine that such parts are separate works if the court concludes that they are distinct works having independent economic value��.
In other words, you can get statutory damages for separate works within a compilation work, even if you only register the compilation work. The twist is that there is very little requirement that a compilation registration list all distinct and separate works contained therein. Thus, you can now register and sue on works and get statutory damages without any real public notice. The main reason for this is that the RIAA was having problems suing for individual song downloads because they had registered the entire album as a single compilation work. As applied to software, this could allow someone like SCO to sue for the copying of a single file or .dll when the vendor had only registered the entire program or OS. So much for metes and bounds.
Is there any easy way to see how the various Reps voted on this bill so I can curse out/thank mine as needed?
Does this help at all? You can also try here (Library of Congress) with HR4077 as Bill Number.
So, does this mean that if an author publishes a set of short stories and explicitly puts them into the public domain (or the author died 100 years ago) that a publisher can now put out a collection under copyright (previously allowed) and based on the Compilation copyright get a copyright on the individual (public domain) works, thus preventing any other compilation to include those short stories individually or collectively?
If not, what in the language of the bill will prevent this from happening?
If the database bill (allowing copyrights on collections of facts – like the phone book) passes, does this mean that a publisher would suddenly be able to copyright (not just trademark) individual facts?
Fuzzy, I think the proposed change is meant to make the fallback argument in Blizzard vs bnetd legally plausible (the argument was that bnetd illegally used “emoticons” from Blizzard’s products, bnetd pointed out that those emoticons weren’t registered as separate works, the court found bnetd guilty for other reasons).
In your example, if I take a picture of a public-domain work, I get copyright only on those aspects of my picture that are creative to me. The public domain work continues to be public domain.
So, a compilation of short stories may be copyrighted, but that copyright only extends to the protectible parts of the compilation — layout, order, etc. A change to the law doesn’t invalidate everything about the old law.
Regarding the database bill, I understand that only applies to copying the database or lare parts of it. If you can’t trace a fact I use to your database, you can’t claim ownership of it (even if it is in your database).
“Copyright law is the ONLY federal IP regulation that doesn�t have mandatory registration.” The Lanham Act does not require registration of trademarks, not even, unlike the Copyright Act, as a prerequisite for an infringement suit.
I agree, If you can�t trace a fact that he uses to your database, you can�t claim ownership of it (even if it is in your database).