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What are the rights and benefits to a registered
copyright?
Once you have fixed your original idea in a tangible
form (onto paper or a tape recording), you have established Federal
copyright protection. This is available regardless of whether you have
registered, published, or not published your authorship. Your copyright
enables you to do the following with legal protection: to reproduce and
distribute the work in copies, to display and perform the work publicly,
to prepare derivative works based on the work, and to transfer the
ownership by sale, rental, lease or lending.
If you do not federally register your copyright,
however, you will forfeit significant options and remedies in enforcing
your ownership of that copyright in litigation and public recording. You
are allowed to register both published and unpublished work anytime
during the copyright period, which affords you the following added legal
protection: an established public record of the copyright; the ability
to sue an infringer for using your copyright; injunction, impounding,
and destruction of infringing copies and/or articles used to make them;
the ability to recover statutory damages, in lieu of actual damages; the
ability to recover attorney fees; and the ability to record the
copyright with U.S. Customs Service against importation of infringing
works (counterfeit goods).
A copyright created on or after January 1978 lasts
for the author’s, or surviving joint author’s lifetime plus seventy
years after death. International copyright protection is available,
where currently the United States has bilateral copyright relations with
approximately one hundred countries. The U.S. has also ratified treaties
with other commercially productive countries against the piracy of
certain copyrighted articles.
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