Re: Re: Exclusive jurisdiction -- remand or dismiss?

You are also ignoring that registration is a significant financial burden for artists creating unique works. To be entitled to the full remedies available, an artist would have to register each and every work. If you sell a unique work for $15, $100 or $200, it's simply cost-prohibitive. Then one of the works is purchased by, say, Christmas Tree Shops (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4772832) and mass-produced. The artist is screwed, because he or she will not be able to get attorneys' fees, statutory damages, and maybe not even enhanced damages for willful infringement, a pretty big penalty for not being able to afford proactive registration of all his or her works. Big business is completely aware of this and infringes with impunity.

Pam Chestek
>
>> If I read this correctly, the concern here is works where the author
>> or publisher didn't bother to register the copyright, presumably
>> because they didn't think the work was worth the effort to do so.
>> Then the work is infringed, and they still don't think the work is
>> worth enough to register and sue. So what's the problem?
>> Copyright is not supposed to be airtight. This looks to me like the
>> law is working just like we'd want it to, preventing nuisance suits
>> for insignificant infringements.
>
> Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way is that federalizing
> copyright removed remedies for infringement that were appropriately scaled
> to the infringements' level of "insignificance." In their place is a
> system
> that clearly doesn't work for the great majority of creators. You can
> blame
> the creators or you can accept that the system shares the blame, as well.
Received on Tue Oct 18 2005 - 01:40:01 GMT