What value do copyright protections and copyright registration bring to my business?
Text Transcript
Travis Stegemoller, Trademark Attorney: Well, there’s a lot of value in actually registering your copyright. First and foremost, it gets you the opportunity to sue an infringer in federal court. Without the registration, you do have a copyright the moment you afix your idea in a tangible medium, but if someone infringes on that copyright, you can’t do anything about it, at least at the federal level, until you register it.
And some of the added benefits of registering include the possibility of getting statutory damages against someone who infringes, which could be up to $150,000. So there’s certainly a lot of value in investing in a copyright registration. Plus, it’s not a really expensive process and it’s not a complicated process. So of the potential IP options available to a startup, it’s one of the more affordable and reasonable options.
Then the next question becomes: how do we identify what about our business is copyrightable, and what should we copyright? So again, any time you suspend an idea, a creative idea, a unique idea, in a tangible medium, you can get a copyright on it, but the question is more about what is valuable to our business? What do our clients, what do our users see as a value that they’re willing to pay for? And then once you identify those pieces, I think it becomes a little bit more clear what you should copyright.