Best Business Practices for Photographers [156]
* * *
Registering your works gives a greater extent of protection, and there are multiple books that go into great detail as to what the differences are between registered and unregistered work, so I will not endeavor to detail that in this book. I will simply state that you should register your work. Few, if any, attorneys will take an infringement case that involves unregistered images.
Although it might seem obvious, it's worth repeating: In almost all cases, unless you signed a work-made-for-hire document before the work was completed and fell into one (or more) of the nine categories previously listed in Chapter 7, as well as all the other conditions, the work is owned by you. If you instead signed a document that stipulated copyright transfer, then your work is not owned by you. If you are an employee of a company as a photographer, then the work you do for them on assignment is theirs, regardless of whether you signed or didn't sign anything. However, this book is geared more toward the freelance photographer (or the staffer who freelances on the side or wants to leave their employment for the freelance world).
Pre-Registration: How to Protect Your Work
Pre-registration has great promise for a number of different types of photography—movie set work, advertising that goes through multiple revisions or approvals, and such. It is a new service of the copyright office, and it is done online. You do not need to provide copies of the work; you just provide a description and other details about the assignment, and at least one of the images for the work that will ultimately be copyrighted has to have been made. For more information, visit www.Copyright.gov to learn more.
Registering Your Work with the Electronic Copyright Office
Before I get into the next section, it is important to discuss the latest offering of services by the Copyright Office—the Electronic Copyright Office, or eCO. Effective August 1, 2009, the fees for online registration are $35, but the Copyright Office has proposed that the $45 fee for the filing of a paper Form VA be increased to $65. Even with this, there are a number of problems that make using the eCO something I would advise you to avoid. Here are a couple of the problems:
Unless you are registering images first published on the same date or in the same "unit" of publication (book, magazine, and so on), you cannot use the eCO to register your work. In other words, since I currently register together the work I produce during the course of a single month, I cannot do that on the eCO. Eventually, they will sort out this problem, but as of this writing, the Form VA (shown in Figure 17.1) and the Short Form VA are the only ways to register a group of published photographs with different publication dates in the same calendar year. You can, however, register groups of images that were unpublished together, even across years.
For a long period of time between when the eCO was officially launched and about mid-2009, whatever you uploaded as a single file had to upload in a total of 30 minutes. That time, as of mid-2009, was increased to an hour. However, that means the single file you upload (that is, a compressed zip file of all the images) can't be bigger than about 11 MB if you are using a dial-up 56k modem and about 170 MB if you are using FiOS optical high-speed Internet. So, you will have to assess how many of your images will fit into a compressed zip file and still be at or below those file sizes. You can upload more than one zip file per registration, but the effective date of the registration will be the date of the last upload, not the first.
Once you decide to venture into the eCO and register your work, you'll want to first create a log-in. This is not an instantaneous process. You register, and then you'll get an e-mail confirming your registration. Be sure that you use the right web browser. For Macs, currently you should be using Firefox; for PC users Firefox or newer versions of Internet Explorer are usable.
Payments can be made either with a credit