Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1399900
Why you should register for copyright protection: According to U.S. law, any person who creates something "fixed in any tangible medium of expression" automatically has copyright protection for that work. But registering it officially with the U.S. Copyright Office (copyright.gov) is an essential, cost-effective way to protect your work because it gives you added legal leverage. "If you think your screenplay or your art is worth the cost, get a copyright registration straight away," says Moss. Depending on the type of material being registered, basic fees can range from $45-$125. Start the process now and then be patient. Apply for your copyright registration early—and wait until you have it before making your work public. This is a tough one to swallow, but the risks are too great. As a result of the 2019 Supreme Court decision in Fourth Estate Pub. Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, copyright holders must have their U.S. Copyright Office-issued registration certificate in hand before they can file a suit for copyright infringement. Kattwinkel says that clients often dis- regard this advice because they don't want to wait months for the U.S. Copyright Office to process the applica- tion. "The minute you put something online, it's vulnerable to illicit copying," she warns. "And it's vulnerable world- wide. Without a registration you have no bargaining power when you tell someone to stop infringing. If they know you can't take them to court, they can ignore you." BEST PRACTICE TIPS • Some online services—with URLs suspiciously close to the official copyright.gov—offer to register your copyrights for you for a premium. Don't use them. Do it yourself. It's simple. • While registering your screenplay with the Writers Guild documents authorship from a given date, it does not guarantee legal protection, so make sure to register with the U.S. Copyright Office. • Register your copyrights annually. One efficient approach is to put all your creative output for the year in a print or digital sketchbook and then register the entire book as a single work. WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE YOU PITCH ORIGINAL WORK When you've created something specific to pitch a client that they may want to adopt, buy, or license from you, it's not always easy to protect. Generally, the same legal concepts apply to literary and graphic works, but the hard truth is that it is much easier to find similarities in written works and thus much harder to protect them. Common elements are inevitable, and if broad ideas without detailed plot and characters—even if they're unique—just aren't protectable, pitching them without a contract exposes them to potential theft without recourse. "That's a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of artists," says Crowell. "The best way to protect yourself is to put your idea—your concept as fully as you can, either in a sketchbook or in a screenplay—and then register copyright to that work." Animation and visual artists naturally have greater protections because they're presenting copyrightable expression, so infringements are easier to spot. Still, gray areas are legion. Your two greatest defenses are nondisclosure agreements and being sure to work only with credible people. Regarding NDAs, though, the big studios and networks will first require you to sign away your right to sue in exchange for allowing you to pitch, since it's possible that they're already working on something with similarity to your work. The thing you can control is being sure to pitch to only reputable people. "Anybody at any sort of high level … they're relying on their reputation," says Moss, "the reputation of the people they're surrounding themselves with, and the copyright law, but nothing else." F E AT U R E CONSIDER USING WATERMARKS AND COPYRIGHT NOTICES Placing watermarks and copyright notices on visual material seems to be falling out of favor, but some still attest to the usefulness, if only as a deterrent to those who believe they have a "right-click license." Even though Google's reverse image search and other software have become extremely effective at tracing stolen images, "when you include a copyright attribution watermark," Crowell says, "the mere fact that somebody took the effort to remove copyright protection from your work gets them into far greater legal hot water." BEST PRACTICE TIP Copyright notices are optional for works created after March 1, 1989, but do it anyway. Put that © at the bottom of the page, or embed it with your metadata in your images, along with the year of publication, your name or the name of your company, and "all rights reserved." Even if you don't have a U.S. Copyright Office registration, there are provisions under the Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) that allow you to go after infringers who have removed that kind of copyright information from your file. 24 KEYFRAME