On Tue, 2022-07-26 at 07:06 -0700,
techlists@phpcoderusa.com wrote:
>
> What is a registered copyright. He has a copyright statement on the
> site.
I'm not a lawyer, just a guy with about 9 registered copyrights and hundreds of web
pages, so what I give you is just opinion. A little web research will give you your
own opinion.
A copyright statement is not registration.
To register his copyright, he would have had to one way or another put the entirety
of his website on an optical drive or a thumb drive, fill out a registration form,
pay about $63.00, and send it to the Library of Congress.
One of the benefits of registering your copyright, if I remember correctly, is that
when some fool copies your stuff you can get an immediate monetary judgement from
them.
Don't get me wrong: The fact that your friend wrote this stuff means he's the
copyright owner. It's legally his. Without your friend's express written permission,
the copycat has no legal standing to copy your friend's work. It's just that without
a registration, you have to spend a lot of money in court.
What were the damages to your friend for the copy? I don't mean the damages for the
loss of his website, I mean the damages for the copying alone. How could such
damages be proven? Has the copier used your friend's work to make a lot of money? If
not, and if it isn't registered, I'd advise your friend to screen scrape every page
of the copy so your friend himself can rebuild his site. Perhaps the copier really
did your friend a service by copying.
One other thing: There's a reason Troubleshooters.Com isn't a Drupal site or a
Wordpress site or a Rails site or a Zope site. The minute a database becomes
involved, both deployment and backup become much, much more difficult. It would also
be incredibly difficult to put a database based site on an optical disk or thumb
drive to send to the Library of Congress. With Troubleshooters.Com, I could just
rsync my local copy to a thumb drive or optical disc and bang, I'm done.
SteveT
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