Articles > Copyright Registration for Web Sites

Copyright Registration for Web Sites

by John D. Lopinski

In recent years, Internet sites have diversified into Web pages devoted to everything from keeping family members or classmates in touch with each other to the major commercial conduits every large corporation maintains. Obtaining protection for the fruits of the frequently considerable creative energy that goes into designing and maintaining an Internet site has become of considerable interest to those who do not want their efforts manipulated or stolen by others. This type of protection is available and falls squarely within the realm of copyright law.

While the U.S. Copyright Office has been somewhat slow in adopting precise criteria for gaining copyright protection in Web sites, such protection is available by obtaining a “copyright registration” for the site. Copyright registration for a Web site can be obtained by filing a form with the Copyright Office, paying a fee, and depositing representative portions of the work being registered, but one must be aware of what the registration will protect.

What can be copyrighted?

In general, a copyright protects original works of authorship “fixed in tangible form of expression.” For works transmitted online, the copyrightable authorship may consist of text, artwork, music, audiovisual works, and the like. However, copyright in no case protects ideas, procedures, systems, or short words or phrases. For online works (other than computer programs and databases), the copyright registration extends only to the copyrightable content of the work as received in the Copyright Office and identified as the subject of the claim. “Copyrightable content” means original works of authorship, and does not include certain things, such as facts or materials that are in the public domain. However, protection may be available
for compilations of facts or public domain materials. For example, one may obtain copyright in a compilation of facts in the form of a database. (See www.copyright.gov under “Copyright Basics” for more information regarding compilations, databases, and links to most other copyright-related topics).

Getting it right

As noted above, copyright in online works only extends to the copyrightable content as received by the Copyright Office and identified as the subject of the claim. This means care should be taken to fill out the registration form carefully and be sure to include an appropriate deposit copy. The application for registration should exclude materials that have been previously registered or are in the public domain. Registration forms are available online at www.copyright.gov under the “Forms” tab.

In general, the form corresponding to the predominant type of content on the Web site should be chosen. For example, a site with mostly artwork should be registered using Form VA, while a site with mostly text should be registered using Form TX. When identifying the subject of the claim (usually in space 2 of the form), a brief statement describing the original authorship being registered should be given using terms that clearly refer to the copyrightable portion of  the work. “Text,” “music,” “artwork,” and “photographs” are suitable descriptions. However, ambiguous statements that refer to elements that may not be protected by copyright should not be used here, such as “layout” or “design.”

Along with the form, a deposit (a sample) of the work must be sent to the Copyright Office. There are essentially two options for choosing the form of deposit to submit. One option is a computer disk that includes the entire work. This can be the .html or other files but must include the entire content. Also, representative portions of the Web site that a copyright examiner can see without a computer (such as a printout) also must be included, generally consisting of five pages. The other deposit option is a reproduction (hard copy) of the entire work, regardless of length. In this case, no computer disk is required.

Generally, the fee for registration is $30, which can be money well spent, as copyright registration is a pre-requisite to taking copyright infringers to court and for recovery of statutory damages, which range from nominal awards to $150,000. Once a registration is in hand, the owner has standing to sue those who may be unlawfully reproducing copyrighted portions of the website.  This is often of considerable importance when the infringer is a competitor of the copyrighted site’s owner, so get those Web site registrations completed early!