copyright registration year clarification

[david_senesac]

I'm in the process of submitting a copyright registration for images I market

on my web site. Thus have gone to the US Copyright office website, read their

information, downloaded forms, and read information about photography copyright

submissions on various internet sites and forum threads. I am interested in

submitting all my web images with the group form with one CD for the $30 fee.

However some images were first loaded onto my web site last year in 2005 when

my site went public while a few others have been loaded onto my site now in

2006. Although I considered my images under copyright from the moment I

received the developed transparencies often years ago, it was not until I began

marketing them on my website that they fit the definition of published

material.

 

From the information I've read one can submit photographs using the group

submission form and fee for images published in a given calendar year. However

to save a few bucks and making it simple, I'd rather submit all my images at

this one time. Thus am wondering what to put in the "Date of First

Publication" field on the Form VA? For those uploaded to my site in 2005, I

might date those at the estimated time I loaded them. For images I've uploaded

this year I'm wondering if I can date them when they were loaded in 2006 or if

the Copyright office will reject the package and ask me to resubmit them

separately? Or whether I might simply date the images as last year? Or if

they just don't really care given the enormous amount of such submissions they

need to process?

 

Am also wondering how much submission of web images protects usage of these

same images when larger formats of the same images are submitted to customers

for say stock use or my sending the images out to printing services?

...David

[qtluong]

Your overall approach is correct, however if you try to register images with publications dates in 2005 and 2006, the CO will reject your registration (they do check them). If you give an incorrect publication date, and an adversarial lawyer finds out (for instance by reading this thread which is archived forever), your registration will likely be invalidated. $30 (soon to be $45) is nothing in this game.

<a href = "http://www.terragalleria.com/">Terra Galleria Photography</a>