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Turns out that a lot of folks think that if they made it, it’s allllll theirs!!! Yeah, no. There is some truth to that statement, but it is limited. Why???OMG, WHY?!

Well…despite the limited concept of if you built it, they will know it’s yours, the most important step in the copyright protection process is being able to demonstrate to others that the item in question is in fact 100% yours.

How do you do that besides screaming it over and over again? Well, you prove it and the best way to do so, is to offer a U.S. Copyright Registration with your name and your artwork (or script or book or teaching materials or many other cools things your brain produced) clearly displayed on it. This matters because you will end up saving yourself a lot of time, effort, frustrations, and some money on just proving the work is even yours. Having in your hands a registered work saves you this major step in the process- and for some, this is a lot of peace of mind worth investing in!

Also, when you register your work with the U.S. Copyright office, you also get a bunch of other rights attached to the registration. Most of these rights are in the form of statutory rights (meaning, you don’t have to litigate to prove it) like attorney fees (the court may awarded you money to pay your attorney for their awesome work against the evil-doer copyright infringer) and provide some prima facie evidence (the court may have to recognize you as the true owner if you have an official registration in your hands). These two things may seem like “whatevers” but for someone who put a lot of hard work and creativity into their work and then have a third party come in and take that hard work away in the form of copyright infringement- these rights alone add a lot of Pros on anyone’s ‘Copyright Registration Pro/Con’ list.

Hence, yes you are technically the ‘owner’ when you create something BUT, the official registration of it SAVES YOU time and money in the long run.