Registering a Copyright

When you create Web pages and send email, the contents are technically protected as soon as you create them. However, if you actually want to sue someone for using your material without permission, you must first obtain a copyright registration. A copyright registration is a legal document that proves you are the author of the content. Under the law, if you obtain a registration within three months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to you as the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, you only will be awarded actual damages and profits.

While you are visiting the United States Copyright Office Web site, explore various links, such as those that provide general copyright or legislative information. In the Legislation section, you might be particularly interested in reading about the legislation to keep pace with advances in digital media and commerce (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and what it means for copyright protection. You might also want to read the information given in the General Information section. If you decide to register your Web site, you can access the necessary forms and fee information in the forms section of the site.

• What is copyright? Copyright is a form of protection grounded in the U.S. Constitution and granted by law for original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Copyright covers both published and unpublished works.
• What does Copyright protect? Copyright, a form of intellectual property law, protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed.

As computers become faster, the other way of putting in knowledge, which is by generating synthetic examples, begins to look better. Generating synthetic examples allows optimization to discover clever ways of using the multilayer network that we did not think of. In fact, we might never fully understand how the multilayer network does it. If we just want good solutions to a problem, generating synthetic examples may be appropriate. Using the idea of synthetic data, there is a brute force approach to handwritten digit recognition. Lenet5 uses knowledge about invariances to design the connectivity and the weight sharing and the pooling that achieves about 80 errors. Adding additional techniques including synthetic data, Ranzato 2008 was able to get the results down to about 40 errors.
A group in Switzerland led by Juergen Schmidhuber implemented this on a large scale with injecting knowledge by putting in synthetic data. They worked on creating instructive synthetic data. For every real training case, they transformed it to make more training examples. They then trained a large neural net with many units per layer using many layers on a graphic processor unit. The graphics processor unit gave them a factor of thirteen computation, and because of all the synthetic data they put in, it did not overfit. If they just use a large neural net with a GPU, it would have been a disaster that would have over fitted terribly, that would have performed fine on the training data and performed terribly on the test data.

When you register a copyright of a Web site, the entire contents of the Web site, including all text and graphics, require only one registration. If the site is redesigned, or if there are significant modifications, the site owner has to decide whether or not to reapply for a copyright. Regarding registering a copyright on email, bear in mind that this is somewhat slippery since there is a lot of confusion over whether messages posted to public lists are considered published or unpublished. See the United States Copyright Office Web Site at www.copyright.gov for more information about registering copyrights.
In Thron v. Harper Collins Publishers, the plaintiff alleged that the defendant misappropriated two of his allegedly copyrighted photographs for use in a book published by the defendant. The plaintiff further contended that the defendant's subsequent efforts to publicize the book through the Internet violated the CMI provisions of the DMCA because the plaintiff had provided Amazon.com with a digital image of one of the photographs that was allegedly impermissibly altered to remove certain unspecified information related to the plaintiff's copyright registration. The court rejected this claim because the plaintiff's copyright registration was itself invalid and because the plaintiff had submitted no competent, admissible evidence to support any finding that the defendant removed or altered the information intentionally, as required by the statute.

The moment the original work is created and "fixed in a tangible medium of expression", copyright law protects it, even if it is never federally registered. Although copyright law protects an original and creative work, filing for the registration in the U.S. Copyright Office is a prerequisite for initiating a legal claim for copyright infringement in the federalcourt system. The courts have held that the registration requirement is a jurisdictional prerequisite to an infringement suit. In the next lesson, you will learn how trademarks and service marks are used.