Need Advice. How to Copyright My Web Content?

[PowerUp]

Hi guys, this is the 1st time I've seriously written articles for my website. I'd appreciate some guidelines to take regarding copyright issue.

1. From the guidelines, I know that the copyright should be formatted like this "(c) 2007 by Company Name. All rights reserved". But I don't own any company. So what should I put in place of the company name?

2. Is it necessary to pay $ to the copyrights office to have my web content copyrighted?

3. The content of my pages will be updated now and then until I'm satisfied with the fluidity of the content. I'll also be adding pages from time to time. So if I pay $ to copyright, will my new pages / updated pages be automatically copyrighted as well?

Thanks.

[edited by: PowerUp at 4:32 am (utc) on Feb. 19, 2007]

[Beagle]

1. Use your own name. If you wrote the article, you hold the copyright to it. The only times a company holds a copyright are if the material is a "work for hire" or if the creator has legally transferred the copyright to it.

2. As soon as you write an article, you automatically hold the copyright. Legally, you don't even have to put a copyright notice on it - although it's certainly a good idea to do that. Registering the work with the Copyright Office gives you more clout in court if there's ever a lawsuit involving the copyright, and allows you to sue for punitive damages if you sue someone for copyright infringement - if you don't register the copyright, you can only sue for the amount of money you actually lost because of the infringement.

3. This one can be complicated, and depends a lot on your site and what you do with it. The copyright is registered for whatever you send to the Copyright Office as being your site's content (IIRC, you send it to them on a CD, but read the instructions on their site to be sure). Whatever you add is copyrighted automatically, just like everything you write (as in #2), but it's not registered unless you send it in (yes, with more $$). So, how often you register your content will depend on how much you feel you need the protection given by registration.

The Copyright Office actually has a fairly user-friendly website where they spell out all the details. There's also information on registering copyrights for things like periodicals and newsletters, which I think some people use as guidelines for registering their web content (I don't know much about that). The link to the site is given in some of the posts in this forum - or you can just go to FirstGov.gov and find it from there.