sr71plt
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2006
- Posts
- 51,872
What infringing "sights" [sic]? Amazon.com? If so, say so. Then all we will be left with is whether I believe you (since you are an established liar on this forum. Remember your recent claim you had permission from an author to post something to this forum when it turned out you didn't even have the author correctly identified? Making you one of the thieves we are fighting here.
)I've said all along that moral suasion sometimes work. With a big business like Amazon.com, though? I doubt that greatly. They really do have copyright lawyers on call as opposed to either this Web site or any of the wishful thinkers making their rosy suppositions here.
Back to Sanichi's bonnet bug about someone else being able to sweep in and register ownership. Obviously Sanichi and other Pollyanas here have never registered a copyright in the United States. I have--both for my own works and within publishing houses.
You fill out a form that requires no vetting information that the work is actually yours, you pay your money (publishers have accounts), the Copyright Office does absolutely no vetting that that work really is yours (something that would be impossible to do anyway). The Copyright Office sends you a registration document if there isn't another clearly identical work on file (and they don't check this too well anyway--I've seen cases in publishing houses where both the author and the publisher paid for and received formal registration on the same work. Usually, the title had changed). When a work is obviously being registered a second time, the Copyright Office will send the subsequent registrant notification that a copyright already seems to be established on the work--and states that the prior copyright registration is the legal one. I've encountered this in publishing houses where the author didn't realize that the publisher usually applies for copyright in the author's name (and at the publisher's expense) and the author has already filed for copyright.
Neither the Copyright Office nor the U.S. courts will involve themselves in any toing and froing over who wrote what when. They don't care. By being stringent on requiring a legal document for them to become involved, they keep their case files trimmed. This contrasts with the UK, which has no copyright registration. There, such things as the "poor man's copyright" (such as mailing a copy of the work back to yourself in a sealed envelope and putting it in a bank vault) are accepted as evidence. These are not accepted in U.S. court (it establishes when the envelope was mailed, not when anything inside it was created). I would think that you could get the work notarized in the States and this would constitute acceptable legal proof, but nothing in the Copyright Law says it would, and I've never heard of it being offered as proof (and it would be just as cheap to go ahead and get a formal registration).
So, the first one filing is the one with the legal document of ownership in hand. Thus, if someone steals your work off the Internet and files for copyright either before or instead of the original author doing so, by current law, it's theirs in the eyes of the judicial system.
The copyright laws weren't/aren't set up to protect anything slapped on the Internet. And a competent lawyer or judge would give anyone the horse laugh who tried to put a case forward on an erotica story they'd already published on the Internet for free reading. The court system is set up on the basis of monetary/physical damages. The damages for smut given away for free already would be considered to be less than zilch.
The reality is that you aren't going to file for copyright on this stuff (but if you wanted to do so, gather a bunch of it together and call it a collection and you can cover it all for copyright under one registration fee--I did that with a series of six novels once).
And the additional reality is that any effort you put into getting your stolen stuff off other sites will only be successful through moral suasion and the other sites being as uninformed about the working of copyright protection as some of you posting to this thread are. Great if that works and often it does--with folks who don't know the law. (Of course, as we've already seen here, chances are it just pops back up on another Web site they have.) But it's not because you had any legal leverage (in the States)--unless you are holding a registration document.
The United States has always leaned toward free access and away from author/composer protection. And it doesn't want its courts bogged down with a lot of copyright squabbling. So, there's practically no case law in copyright--and certainly none where the work hasn't been formally registered. The reality hasn't been set up to make authors genuinely protected--it's been set up to create a veneer of unsupported belief by authors and possible thieves alike that there are protections. (I know, because I helped set the system up.)
The United States did, finally, as one of the last countries to do so, sign the Berne Convention that establishes "a work is yours as soon as created," principle but it only signed it so it could pursue its own fight against media piracy from abroad on some legal standing. It did not change its superseding laws to give that principle any teeth. You still have to hold a formal registration document in the United States to establish legal ownership.
If you can't grasp this, it's just too bad for you, I'm afraid. And not liking someone giving you the bad news and denigrating them and making fun of them doesn't change reality for you. It just makes you a fool. The least you could do (for yourself) is research this for yourself before making uninformed assumptions. For starters (after reading the "has to be registered" sentence from the Copyright Office Web site already provided above), try finding any case law that supports what you want to be.
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