Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review an important Supreme Court copyright law decision from a few weeks ago, dealing with requirements for enforcing your copyright in federal courts.
The case we cover today is Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation vs. Wall-Street.com, but the facts of the case are not as important as the overlying rule in dispute. The Supreme Court took on this case to settle a split of decisions going opposite ways in the Circuit Courts in various regions of the country. The split was over whether a finalized copyright registration is required to sue someone for copyright infringement in the federal courts, or whether a filing of an application is sufficient to allow you into federal court.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a finalized registration after review by the U.S. Copyright Office is a prerequisite to suing a third party in court to enforce a copyright. It has long been understood that federal registration is the Wonka's Golden Ticket into federal court, along with providing several other important legal benefits, but this decision confirms a mere application filing is not enough. Copyrights are covered only by federal law, so federal court is the only place to enforce such rights.
The copyright registration process can take a few weeks or a few months. While this is not a ton of time in the overall intellectual property landscape, these delays can be significant when a profitable work has been knocked off and you seek to enforce copyright to stop the knockoff. As such, the impetus is on authors and creators to register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office as early as possible, not just wait until the competitor infringes the work.
Copyright is a natural legal right that immediately attaches to a creative work as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium, which can be as simple as saving a Word document draft on a computer, for example. However, ownership of a copyright does not entitle a copyright holder to enforcement rights in court, and that's where federal registration in the U.S. kicks in. The point of requiring registration is to help prove authorship and the right to claim copyright before that issue would need to be litigated by a court.
Justice Ginsburg, writing for the court, also noted that reading the law the other way would not make sense because it would allow for wasted efforts where the Copyright Office refuses registration but a lawsuit has been ongoing in the meantime. Pragmatic examples like this helped win the day at the Court during oral arguments and then in the final written opinion.
The Bottom Line is: if you're worried about potential competitors or knockoffs taking your copyrighted work, the Supreme Court has sent the message loud and clear - register those works early, or face the risk of delay before you can even file a lawsuit in federal court against an infringement. The Supreme Court often steps in when the appeals Circuit Courts cannot agree on a law like this, and now we have clarity for the requirements to enter federal court.
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