Copyright Infringement & You
March 16th, 2010 | 
Author: These days almost everything on the Internet carries a copyright notice, Pictures,websites articles and often people acquire these materials the find the owner is threatening legal action for infringing their copyright.
When this happens Don’t panic most of these threats are just that worded to scare you into removing the material, however you may not have to, see although placing a copyright © on a page or a picture it does not mean that the owner is eligible to sue.
In order for the owner of a work to sue for infringement that work must be duly registered for Intellectual property copyright and General copyright in the country the infringement has occurred, now the Berne Convention does allow basic transfer of copyright between participating countries but the fact remains there needs to be a physical copyright in place to legally sue someone for copyright infringement.
This being the case it is your right to challenge the owner of the work to provide proof that a Registered copyright indeed exists and without that proof you are not legally required to honor any copyright notices .
Courts will not hear cases where no Registered Copyright or Intellectual property Copyright exists, the same might be said for trademarks and brands however it is more likely that a trademark or brand has been registered whereas most website designers, amateur artists even software developers falsely rely on if they have the © on their work it is covered.
Now i am not a lawyer but i do know how to read and there are plenty of articles written by experts on copyright law available on the internet which outline how to copyright a work so that it has legal status, I have included below a few of these links where i sourced my information for this article.
Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Property. [Link added: March 2007].
Current text of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Property. [Link added: March 2007.]
Intellectual Property Law directory at Yahoo!
Bitlaw – A Resource for Technology Law (U.S. based web site), with very useful information regarding intellectual property in general and internet publishing.
R.I.G.H.T.S. – Redistribution in Graphics Has to Stop
Sphere: Related Content
Not everyone will agree especially those that have artwork or produced works online however the purpose of the article is to point out that simply placing a copyright notice is not enough to protect those works it needs to be Registered for copyright before the owner can sue for infringement and in fact it’s entirely possible that without proper registration of the copyright it’s possible that ones work could be “legally” stolen simply by the thief registering the copyrights and paying the fees involved.