Copyright Registrations
You created it through blood, sweat, and tears.
Now protect it.
Copyrights are a group of rights which allow you to, among other things, stop all unlawful and unauthorized reproduction of your creative works. Unlike a trademark, a copyright protects creative works. Think of this as something along the lines of a book, photograph, drawing, painting, song, etc. Copyrights also protect computer code and a myriad of other categories that may not initially come to mind. Copyright protection is limited to exact or substantially-similar copies of your creative work. Copyrights do not protect an “idea”, but rather your creative expression of that idea.
You have copyrights in your creative works the second you create them in a tangible form. However, enforcing those copyrights can be extremely difficult—if not outright impossible—without registering your creative works with the U.S. Copyright Office. Ultimately, if you want to stop others from using and distributing your copy-written works you’ll need a federal copyright registration.
For copyright applications, we recommend filing a federal application with the Copyright Office as soon as possible after the work is created, in order to establish your “effective date.” You will also need to submit a copy of the work, called a “deposit”, to the Copyright Office, either electronically or the old fashioned way—by mail. We are happy to offer a flat-rate fee of $500.00 for filing a copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Copyright applications generally take 4–5 months to be processed by the Copyright Office and approved, but can take longer depending on the type of work and whether a copyright librarian notices any defects in your application. Like a trademark application, one your registration issues, you are retroactively protected from the date that you submitted your application.