Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
You misunderstood me. I never said you had to "register" or "claim" or "announce" your work for a copyright to exist. I agree, the copyright is there when the work is created.
What I did say however, is that if someone infringes on this copyright that enforcement is not "automatic". The police will not come after you on their own volition, even if they have strong suspicions that you are violating a copyright (as I said previously, there may be exceptions to this in extreme cases).
The copyright owner has to "claim" (or "announce") that they own copyright to start the legal process off. Typically this would be done by filing a lawsuit. And this claim/announcement is of course done in the legal arena, not with a megaphone and handing out fliers to random people in the city square. Without this claim of copyright in the legal arena, the infringer has nothing to worry about. In the non-extreme case, you can violate copyright all day long without penalty ... right up until the copyright owner claims "Hey that is my work!" and takes you to court. But if the copyright owner does not claim his/her work, then the police are not going to come after you (again, extreme cases may be different).
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The chances of the police,
ever, showing up on a copyright case are somewhere in the vicinity of .000000001%. (Honestly, I wish that the did--it would make copyright infringement taken more seriously than it is.) It's pretty much up to the copyright holder to sue in civil court. Are there
some instances where a cop
might show up? Sure, if the DA is involved or the feds, in a case, but as noted, that would be exceedingly rare. Some sort of massive infringement operation.
Even people being sued
aren't going to be escorted anywhere by the cops.
Hitch