Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The big reason for allowing protection w/o registration is that copyrighted material, unlike patented & trademarked things, often needs to be marketed before it has proven commercial value. Patents aren't necessary until you've decided to make something to sell; trademarks are irrelevant if the public doesn't see them--but copyrighted material is often sent to a publisher (or magazine editor, or movie producer) in the hopes that it'll be found commercially viable.
An author can't afford to register, even at a token cost, every rough draft or story outline, in order to keep publishers from grabbing the submission from a slushpile & publishing it w/o permission. A photographer can't register each of a hundred photos before submitting them for consideration to a magazine. Even if they could all be registered at once, the time-delay involved is ridiculous.
I have no problems with copyright protection starting from the moment of creation (although I could really go for a requirement to affix a notice to things, to indicate who owns that copyright), and registration coming later, either in order to deal with a lawsuit, or after 20-50 years, to continue the monopoly on commercial exploitation.
And moving from our current situation, rather than the one that existed before copyright was attached to everything automatically, there's other issues--every blog post is currently copyrighted, so nobody can grab a set of them and publish "funniest anecdotes from the internet 2010" without permission. Changing the law back, would require either notifying all those people (!) that they need to put notices on their works, or making a rule that "content created between ~1989 and 2012 doesn't require a copyright notice; after that, works published, including on the web, without a notice, are in the public domain."
Of course, that immediately tangles into the Berne convention; countries still following it would not require that notice, and it'd bring up issues of "what country is this web content published in?" (Is it based on the location of the author? The author's ISP? The location of the servers of the web content host? If I post at MR, am I covered by Canadian copyright law, and when I post at Dreamwidth, by US copyright law?)
Is big tangled mess.
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May I suggest some practical answers to my viewpoint? Provide seed money to the copyright office to set up server farm for online submissions, and a return receipt verification for physical submissions. A "copyright pending" (like patent pending, until the copyright office finished the paperwork and issues the copyright. Is this so difficult to do?
As for existing art, a copyright is maintained until a certain date, with anything not submitted for copyright to fall into the public domain.
It's not insurmountable.
(I wonder whether somebody could invoke copyright to prevent a confession from being used...Hmmm...)