What are the benefits of copyright registration
What would you feel if you had created a new kind of energy which was to become #1 invention in the entire world and then all of a sudden you had the idea stolen by someone else? The regrets related to theft and plagiarism extend to smaller cases; not only to big time innovations. Even when someone steals the music piece composed by you or a paragraph of text written by you, it seems like the whole world is so unfair because that is now how it was meant to be. In order to prevent that from happening people need to learn what copyright is and how the benefits of copyright registration can make one’s inventions more secure. Since theft and plagiarism have become so common today, the protection of one’s work seems to be an escalated issue. In this article we are going to shed some light on the advantages of copyright registration and how it can help authors in the further rights to use their own works.
Registering Exclusive Rights for the Use of Your Intellectual Property
First of all, let us deal with the term “copyright” in order to establish the common ground before we move on to the registration. Copyright is a legal right granting the author of an original work exclusive rights to use, distribute and benefit from the work. Such rights come into effect immediately after the publication of the work regardless of whether the author decided to register the copyright or he/she chose not to do so. But despite the fact that it comes into effect immediately after publication, the benefits of copyright registration are still too significant to ignore them; therefore, people need to take into account what they can potentially lose if they choose not to register the copyright with the respective government agency.
First of all, when you register your copyright, you basically create a public record of your works and a valid proof that you are true author and owner of the invention. That means that whatever you created will be published in a special catalog that will be available to the public. This will eventually help to deal with claims of the so-called “innocent infringement” quite easily. Secondly, the benefits of copyright registrations include the opportunity to sue plagiarists for copyright infringement which may be an additional constraint for thieves of intellectual property. Thirdly, if you register your copyright within first five years of publication, then you will have a solid evidence in court regarding the validity of your copyright which can eliminate much of the headache if you don’t do so. A lot of issues arise when people have to actually prove their rights for the work if the registration hasn’t been done. Lastly (and it may be one of the most important advantages of copyright registration), it entitles the holder to statuary damages. In other words, one will be eligible for bigger compensations.
Conclusion
The benefits of copyright are quite obvious. The rights granted to the creator of the work become more and more important today when the number of plagiarism cases has been constantly growing across the country. But sometimes in order to make use of the copyright, one has to spend a good amount of money and time. That is where the advantages of copyright registration must be recalled we believe. Without a timely registration, the copyright holder can do very little to stop the plagiarists from using his or her work. This fact alone should be a sufficient reason why people should register their copyrights.
Description: Copyright registration should help the authors of intellectual property protect themselves from thieves and plagiarists better.
