Re: Copyrighting

Ryan Brock <phrogman[_at_]thegrid.net> wrote:
>
> Hello, My name is Ryan Brock and I co-own a new web design company. I
> would like to know (if you can answer) how I would be able to copyright
> homepages that I make. Thanks in advance.

To the extent that it contains copyrightable material, a web page is a "literary work" under U.S. copyright law. As many will inform you, it is no longer necessary to register a work to obtain copyright. Copyright inheres as soon as the work is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression".

However, there are certain advantages under U.S. copyright law in registering a work (such as the fact that registration is prerequisite to filing an infringement suit).

Registration requires transmitting to the Register of Copyrights: 1) a completed application form (Form TX for literary works); 2) a nonrefundable registration fee of $20; 3) "deposit material". The question for web pages is, what is appropriate "deposit material"?

Deposit material for published works in traditional media comprise two complete copies of the best edition of the work. There are a large number of ways to deposit material for "machine readable works", which center around depositing identifying material showing the entire copyrightable content of the work. What _I_ have done, however (and NOTE WELL I have not yet received a response from the copyright office on this) is deposit two complete hard copies of the HTML source code, two complete copies of printouts of every web page from a browser, and two complete copies of screen dumps of every web page (these latter two may really differ if _your_ copyrighted material is contained in pages implementing framing).

I would be very interested in what others have used as deposit material for copyright registration applications for web pages.

Anthony Claiborne
<abc[_at_]ares.csd.net> Received on Fri Jul 25 1997 - 15:11:16 GMT