That being said, how the heck can you copyright something written on the net? It has no provable publication date. How do you prove it is yours? If it is not required to register copyrighted material, how does one protect online information?
Two different questions here. Darkhawk's answered the first one, which is "It's copyrighted as soon as it's in fixed form, which includes posting."
The next question is how do you handle it if someone uses your stuff. That one's more complicated. In the US, this is covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has requirements for how you deal with these things. The DMCA is designed, in part, to protect hosting providers whose users post copyright violations on their site, *as long as* they take steps to remove them when properly notified.
Since most violations these days involve an individual user posting something on a site hosted by another company in some format (whether that's a webhosting service, a forum, a journalling or social networking site, whatever), here's the generic steps for that situation.
All of the following presume that you are either the copyright holder or are legally and formally authorised to act instead of the copyright holder (which does usually involve a legal contract of some kind: a lawyer could act for you, for example, but your friend Jane can't act for you just because she sees your stuff and knows it's yours.)
First:Contact the poster directly if they give you any option to. Sometimes, people really legitimately don't know that it's wrong, and education can work better (and faster!) than a large stick of legal implications. Give them a reasonable time to respond (the law doesn't suggest a number, but 3-5 days is a good range, maybe a bit longer over major common vacations when people might be away from the computer.)
A small stick is fine: a "I see that you have posted X, which I wrote in [whenever.]. As noted at [original location], it is under copyright. Can you please remove it by [date]? Otherwise, I will need to pursue removal under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act via your hosting service, which could have legal and hosting implications for you that I'm sure you'd rather avoid."
If that doesn't work: 1) Figure out who their hosting provider is.
Service providers are required to make available a DMCA report address of some kind - it's often in their FAQ, Terms of Service info, or available through their support address. Generally DNS searches will help you figure this out, but that's a whole topic of its own. (In general, a plea of "I think there's infringing material on X site, but I can't tell who to make the report to!" around a few friendly geeks will solve this one pretty easily. I note that I am a friendly geek happy to see what I can dig up on this kind of thing if you send me details.)
Sites are required to have someone assigned to deal with DMCA issues - but someone, say, providing hosting to their friends, or running a small hobby site may not understand that. That's why you may need to climb a little further up the ladder to the people actually running the servers, who have a vested interested in not paying massive penalties for DMCA violation.
2) Before you contact them, prepare a properly formatted DMCA notice. This includes:
- A physical or electronic signature of copyright holder (you, presumably, or someone you've authorised to act for you). (Some sites require a physical letter, some will accept an emailed letter under penalty of perjury. They'll generally tell you up front.)
- Identification of the material that you claim infringes on your copyright - this is the original source material. Generally, you provide the URL of the original if it's online, a representative list of URLS if lots and lots of material has been copied.
- Enough information for the site to identify exactly which places on their site have the infringing material. Again, this will generally be a URL, though providing additional info ("Blog entry titled X posted at Y date") can also be helpful.
- Sufficient contact information for the site to contact you - address, telephone, email address, etc. (again, different sites can set their own requirements, and will usually tell you.)
- A statement saying that you belief that the material used in this way is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
- A statement saying that under penalty of perjury, the information provided in this report is accurate, and that you are authorised to act on the behalf of the owner/are the owner of the right being infringed.
3) Note that if you claim copyrighted materials that aren't yours, file a false claim, or otherwise misrepresent the case, you can be responsible for damages and/or legal fees.
Also note that if the use is in the realm of fair use, things get a lot messier: for example, if someone quotes an essay of yours, but breaks it up into paragraphs, with new and original content analysing your essay, that might be considered fair use (because it's use that extends academic knowledge in the field, and it also is adding substantial new and original content to the original work.) Cases like these have to be decided in court, and that *is* complicated and messy, because you have all sorts of issues of where do you file, given that this is online material.
4) The site will review the information and respond within a reasonable time frame (often they'll tell you).
(If they don't respond at all after, say, 2 weeks, go up the ladder another step.)
Larger sites generally send an email to the person who posted it, saying, essentially "We've received a copyright takedown request for [item]. We have removed it from the site." and information about filing a counter-takedown notice - which basically means agreeing to be sued if the copyright holder wishes.
The EFF actually has a really nice description of how this works on YouTube - the DMCA section, part 3, is the one you want, and the page is
http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-youtube-removals .
The downside is that if you don't wish to sue *and* the person files a counter-notification, there's not much the site can do. They are not a court, they can't decide whether a particular use is legal under fair use or other possible exemptions. They can't determine ownership of copyright. All they can do (and all that the law requires them to do) is facilitate the initial takedown request.
In practice, all of this works fairly well if it's straight one-on-one duplication of someone's work, and the removal is really clear cut. It works okay with academic/review/related uses (because we've got a good idea what this looks like in print, and have some precedents.) It works really lousily with transformative works (say, someone taking clips from a video and combining them in a new way, making an icon from a still from a commercial film, etc.)
And in practice, pursuing the legal option beyond a request to the provider only makes a lot of sense if you are
a) actually losing money from someone else's use
b) have registered your copyright previously
c) are therefore seeking damages.
(As I mentioned, you usually need registration to stand a chance of qualifying for significant damages: otherwise, you're at best probably looking at recovery of court and related costs based on current precedent.)
I *strongly* suspect there's going to be new legislation sometime this decade about this - at least about how to handle the provider reporting part and resolving legal cases for the simple stuff much more easily. But we're not there yet. In the meantime, for the people who just took someone else's stuff 'cause it looked cool, and didn't know better, the DMCA process works okay.
I had no idea that copyright was automatic, I always thought it was like registering a patent.
RowanFox - you're enough older than I am that when you were initially learning about this, that might have been true. The rules changed significantly in the late 80s around whether you were required to register it, or mark it as copyrighted via a copyright statement. (i.e. Work copyrighted by Jenett, 2010). But these days, nope.
Copyright also doesn't have to be defended to be maintained, unlike a trademark. Someone can be using your copyrighted material for decades, and you can suddenly find out, and take action. With trademarks, if you don't act within a relatively short time of realising the infringement, you can lose out on penalties.
Useful links:http://www.copyright.gov/ - I recommend their FAQ and the Teachers nad Students link for folks who want to learn more
http://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-youtube-removals - while YouTube specific, this does a great job of laying out a bunch of the most common issues (especially around computer review vs. real human review.)
http://www.teachingcopyright.org/ from the EFF also has good educational material
Important Information about this Archive Board
