Re: web-publishing & copyright...

[Ryan Day wrote to ask about how to protect short stories that he plans to post on his web page]

Of the several persons who posted responses to Day's question, no fewer than five of them answered by saying that Mr. Day should file copyright registration applications with the United States Copyright Office.
(Several went so far as to state the amount of the fee in US dollars and
to provide links to the US Copyright Office web page.) Most of those responding also quoted the Berne Convention language that provides that a work is automatically protected by copyright as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium. This would have been good advice *if* Mr. Day were concerned with US law. But nowhere did Mr. Day say he was interested in US law.

It is all too easy to assume, when preparing a response to a question, that the person asking the question is in the same country as oneself.
(Most of the participants in this list, including most of those who
responded to Mr. Day, are in the US.) But Mr. Day's email address ends in ".ca" and his .sig mentions Carleton University (which is in Canada) which suggests Mr. Day is located in Canada and may, in fact, be interested in knowing how to protect his short stories under Canadian law.

Did those who quoted the Berne language to Mr. Day take the trouble to check to see whether Canada is a signatory to the Berne Convention? Did they check further to see whether Canada has actually passed the enabling legislation that brings Berne into effect in Canada? I checked just now (on the site of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office) and read that "Copyright applies to all original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works provided that the work is fixed in a material form." So it appears that Canada *is* a signatory to Berne *and* that it has passed the enabling legislation. But would it not be better for Mr. Day to hear this from someone who is admitted to practice in Canada and who is familiar with the state of copyright law in Canada? Should Mr. Day not be referred, for example, to the Canadian Intellectual Property Office's copyright information page at

   http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/cipo/prod_ser/prod_e.html#copyrights ?

The same questions could be asked, however, even if Mr. Day's email address had ended in ".com". After all, the person posting from a ".com" domain name might be anywhere in the world. And indeed even though Mr. Day posted from a ".ca" domain name, it is possible Mr. Day was actually posting from (and interested in the copyright law of) Tonga, or Yugoslavia, or Taiwan. Mr. Day may have been posting from a country that *does not belong to Bern*, in which case it would be quite wrong to assume that Mr. Day's work is protected by copyright from the moment it is fixed in a tangible medium.

On the particular issue of copyright registration in the US Copyright Office, of course, the main issue is not so much "where is Mr. Day located?" as "where might Mr. Day be seeking to enforce copyright rights?" To the extent that there is some chance Mr. Day might seek to sue infringers who are themselves within the US, it would certainly be helpful to Mr. Day to have copyright registrations in the US.

I am sure that from time to time I, too, have assumed that some poster is asking about US law when in fact it may be otherwise. Let's all try to watch ourselves and make sure we do not make such assumptions.

Carl Oppedahl
<carl[_at_]oppedahl.com> Received on Tue Mar 17 1998 - 16:09:23 GMT