Online Copyright registration
- Thread starter pjay79
- Start date
Ty Fancher
Active member
i think you have to wait for the certificate. Which could take a couple weeks or months. If you submit it to the writers guild, it's immediately registered.
Copyright is effective the day your registration is recived by USCO provided that said submission is not rejected for some reason. If it is rejected and you have to re-submit, its not like a patent where you keep your orignal submit date. If you have to resubmit, how many ever times, the date your work is considered registered is the date your approved submission was in the USCO offices. USCO stamps incoming mail with a recived date daily. Even if it takes them weeks or months to get around to processing your submission (which it will), the registration date will be the date that it was recived in the USCO offices. For this reason, you should always send with some sort of tracking, i.e. FedEx Signature Required. The date its in the offices hands, not the postmark date. In the case of an online submission, its recived electronically, so thet have it immediately and thus your submit date and your registration date are the same. You should call and verify this, but the last I was submitting (which was before you could do it online) this was the deal.
Registering with WGA does not offer the same level of protection that registering with USCO does. They each have their purpose, pros and cons, register with both of them. You are going to ask a studio to pay half a million dollars for your script. If you find yourself unwilling and/or second guessing your decision to pay ~$50 to protect it, then you need to ask yourself if you really have something worth protecting at all.
(That was a general observation, by the way. Not directed at you or anyone in paticular, just a general thought produced by my jumbled brain.)
The main benifiet of registering your work with USCO is it changes how much money you can get when you sue someone who steals your work. Unregistered work (or that which is registered with WGA or even with "poor man's copyright") is still copyrighted as its created. The difference between something registered with USCO and something that is not is stuatory damages. For USCO registered items, if you sue someone for stealing your work and they indeed stole it, they are liable to you for stuatory damaes of $100,000 PER INFRINGEMENT as a matter of law. Even if they never made a dime and even if thier infringement never cost you a dime. Whereas, when suing for infringement of non-registered works, you are limited to actual damages only. Proving actual damages in these types of cases can be damn near impossible. You WANT the ability to go after those stuatory damages if you ever need to deal with this issue. For starters, unless the defendant is very flush with cash and there is a HUGE amount of actual damages that are very proveable, no attorney will touch the case with a 39 1/2' pole.
Randall_Oelerich
Veteran
I have registered about a dozen screenplays (mostly shorts) and a short film with the USCO this past year, all done online. I would say the average time to get my certificate in my home mailbox was perhaps 2-3 months, so be patient. 5 months seems excessive but I suppose it depends on their backlog.
pmark23
Veteran
To clarify a point KeithK made, the date of the copyright starts as soon as you write whatever you're copyrighting AND CAN PROVE IT. Their timestamp is official, but if you can prove earlier (for example, with a WGA registration) then that date can be used in any court cases.
Also, there isn't a need to rush a registration. As long as you can prove it's yours (WGA again), you can register much later. I think they allow a 6 month period, but it may be longer.
The main benefit (as Keith says) of a US Copyright is the automatic infraction penalties (but are only available in the US).
Also, there isn't a need to rush a registration. As long as you can prove it's yours (WGA again), you can register much later. I think they allow a 6 month period, but it may be longer.
The main benefit (as Keith says) of a US Copyright is the automatic infraction penalties (but are only available in the US).
A close runner-up benefit (with so much stuff being made overseas and brought into the States) is that if your work is stolen by an overseas outfit, your copyright registration allows you - through the courts - to stop counterfeit production within the US (and by extension, countries that have a compact with the United States) and also to seize counterfeit copies at the border when they come in through customs.
In all honesty, the chances of your work being stolen and used in a manner that you can do something about is relatively unlikely. What is more likely is that you'll be a victim of what I call "vicious fair use", where the person desiring to screw you changes things up just enough to make thier work an orginal and then goes to town on it. Often there is nothing you can do to stop this legally, but then you can go into the court of public opinion and probably get a favorable verdict. Few will want to be associated with a plagerist.
Copyright does not prevent theft of work. Just ask the RIAA. Its primarily a deterrent. For the RIAA, copyright has not and will not help them out very much. Because while anyone can rip a CD and sent it out to the torrent sites, relatively few people can take a script, turn it into a movie and sell it in numbers sufficent to make the hassle worthwhile outside of the mainstream channels. And the mainstream channels are not going to tarnish thier reputation (or put thier vast fortunes at risk) by taking your work. Not to say it hasnt happened a time or two in the past, its just not likely to happen to you in the future.
Randall_Oelerich
Veteran
I started out using WGA, $15 versus $45 for USCO. But now WGA wants $20 and USCO is $35 online. And a problem I have with WGA is that $20 only gets you five years of registration in their system, then you have to shell out another $20 every five years (or whatever their fee increases to every five years). USCO is for life and then some, no worries about a screenplay disappearing from a digital storage system because you forgot to pay up again every five years. That, combined with the better legal protection of the USCO mad my decision to only go with USCO.
GregWilliams2175
Active member
I did mine through the USCO. It has bee a few months and I have yet to hear anything.
