How Does a Copyright Protect Me When I Have to Submit the Work Publicly to the Copyright Office?

Last week a reader asked, “Paying for copyright protection is supposed to shield you, but the office lists online what you have submitted to them, thereby completely exposing your material for anyone who can do a simple free search. How does copyright protection really protect you?”

That’s a really good question, and it requires that we go back to the Copyright Law. Copyright law protects “original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.” This means that actually making the work physically perceivable is a prerequisite to obtaining protection under the copyright laws.

Copyright laws don’t protect the idea or the concept behind the work, only the physical expression of it. For example, if you have an idea about a story where two people meet on a doomed ocean liner and fall in love even though they are of a different social class, it’s not protected by copyright law until you reduce that idea to something tangible, like a screenplay. (Can you guess which movie I’m referring too?) The screenplay is protected by copyright law, but the idea is not. If the screenplay is turned into a derivative work, like a movie, then that is also protected by copyright law.

You don’t have to pay for copyright protection; it’s yours as soon as you reduce your creative idea to a tangible medium of expression. What a copyright filing does get you is the right to statutory damages and the presumption that you are the owner of the work, and the work was created on a certain date. This saves you the trouble of later having to prove all of that if you have to sue a naughty infringer for copyright infringement.

When you file, you have to submit a copy of the protected work so that everyone knows what exactly you are claiming under the copyright law. Note that you don’t have to submit anything, but you won’t get statutory damages and all the other benefits and presumptions. You already own the copyright for anything you produce, but a registration gives your cease and desist letter to a copyright infringer a little more teeth, and is more likely to garner compliance when you ask them to stop stealing your stuff.

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