Copyrighting a website - registering

Are updates needed?

[farmboy]

If you register a website with the U.S. copyright office, is there a need to update the registration as updates are made to the site?

If a site is registered, are downloadable documents on the site covered by the registration?

FarmBoy

[stapel]

farmboy said: If you register a website with the U.S. copyright office, is there a need to update the registration as updates are made to the site?

To a certain extent, that may depend upon what you mean by "update".

If you add entirely new content, this is not, to my understanding, covered under the previous copyright registration.

If you just edit your pages (correcting typoes, updating statistical information, etc), then the resulting "derivative works" should, I believe, be covered by the existing registration.

farmboy said: If a site is registered, are downloadable documents on the site covered by the registration?

If those documents were included within the registration application (and you own the rights to those documents), then they should be covered by the copyright.

You will, of course, want to consult with an attorney for iron-clad assurances.

Eliz.

[farmboy]

If you add entirely new content, this is not, to my understanding, covered under the previous copyright registration.

Hmmm. That would seem to indicate that a site that
has new content added daily needs to be registering or "re-registering" daily? Surely there is a process for this.

FarmBoy

[stapel]

farmboy said: That would seem to indicate that a site that has new content added daily needs to be registering or "re-registering" daily? Surely there is a process for this.

It seems reasonable that there would be a process for this, since there is one in place for newspapers and such which, necessarily, must output entirely new material every day.

For traditional media (like newspapers), I believe the process is a once-a-month sort of thing. I haven't looked into the analagous process for a frequently-updated web site. But you might try poking around on the Copyright.gov site, to see what they've got there.

Eliz.

[Content_ed]

Hmmm. That would seem to indicate that a site that
has new content added daily needs to be registering or "re-registering" daily? Surely there is a process for this.

The saving grace is that you don't need to file a copyright immediately for the full protection. There's a three month grace period for filing on any newly published material, so filing once every three months wth all the updates is just as good as filing every day.

Copyright office has a pretty good phamplet about website copyright, Circular 66, which you can get as a PDF on their website.

[stapel]

Link to HTML version: Circular 66 [copyright.gov]

Also available as a PDF [copyright.gov] document.