by R. Scott Thompson
9/7/2010 10:20:00 AM
Say you have a small business, and periodically send your customers a newsletter. Should the newsletter be copyrighted?
You are not required to have the newsletter copyrighted to protect it, because at the moment the newsletter is created, the copyright is automatically vested in your company (assuming it was created in the name of the company and your employees’ contributions are pursuant to their employment with you). You can even use the © symbol, just be sure to follow it with the year of creation and the name of the copyright owner.
The real question is whether you should register your copyright with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. There are two primary reasons to register a work. First, it creates a presumption that you are the author in case of a later challenge. Second, you cannot sue for infringement of your copyright until you register.
However, whether you wish to go to the trouble of copyrighting your work is a different question. If your work is unique or distinctive, or good enough that someone else might profit from its use, you certainly may wish to. Factors that you may want to consider include the nature of the information in the newsletter, whether subscriptions are free or fee-based (and therefore have independent economic value), how likely someone is to want to infringe your work, and whether you ultimately care that much if they do. Often, with newsletters, a publisher may hope they are copied and distributed to others, as a means of advertising. You may wish to consult an attorney in making this decision.
If you decide to copyright the newsletter, you may register every copy of the newsletter, but you are not required to. Some documents that are created as “serials,” like periodic newsletters, may be registered as a group, called a “collected work,” if they meet certain requirements. These requirements include that the copyright claim is in the collective work, the newsletters must be works-for-hire and the works must be essentially all new publications. Current registration fees are $35 for single works, $25 per work for up to 3 months of serials published once a week or less, and $80 for a month’s worth of serials that are published twice a week or more.