I just read this interview with photographer Andrew Buchanan, on the Copyright Alliance site (by the way, if you aren’t a member of the Copyright Alliance, you should be, in my opinion). In it, he says that he pursues infringers not only because he deserves to get paid for his work, but also because his clients pay him for his original work and if infringers use the work, then his clients are getting hurt.
I love that attitude and smart business thinking. By pursuing infringers, you are serving your clients as well as protecting yourself. You can even use that in your marketing! Let your clients know that while you can’t get every infringer, you do make efforts to make sure that infringers don’t use the work you are licensing. That is an added service value.
Mr. Buchanan is right in that registration is still a pain in the ass in some ways (like the whole published/unpublished thing, to start), but it’s part of what you need to do to ensure the viability of your cases, especially the more minor value infringements. I read a case recently, Gonzales v. Transfer Technologies, Inc., 301 F. 3d 608, 609 (7th Cir. 2002), that noted:
No one can prosecute a copyright suit for $3,000. The effect of the district court’s decision if universalized would be to allow minor infringements, though willful, to be committed with impunity, to be in effect privileged, immune from legal redress. The smaller the damages, provided there is a real, and especially a willful, infringement, the stronger the case for an award of attorneys’ fees.
That’s great, and it also shows what I keep saying: you can (and should) go after small infringements and they don’t all cost $100K to do (not even close). But, and this is a big BUT, you can only possibly get attorneys’ fees if you have registered the copyright in your work before the infringement in question starts (or within a 3-month window of first publication for published work only).
So, register your work asap after creation, go after infringers, and tell your clients you are protecting them as well as yourself by doing so. You might even consider raising your rates to reflect your added value to your clients.
Just a thought. 🙂