But to answer @6 and correct what some people here have been assuming, this rule does NOT say that you can’t sue for infringements from before you registered. It just says that you must go about registering before you actually start the lawsuit. Since these days you automatically do have copyright upon creating a work regardless of whether you’ve registered it, once you do register you could sue for earlier infringements. In other words, the registration rule isn’t about whether you own the work, it’s just a special requirement to sue.

But two important caveats on that. First, you can’t seek the automatic statutory damages unless you registered in time. (Meaning prior to infringement, unless the infringement soon after publication and you still registered w/in 3 months of publication.) They could still maintain the suit, but they’d be seeking actual damage caused rather than the automatic amounts. In terms of money, this means that their failure to register is very important, but I suspect a lot of potential defendants would still be willing to pay to not get dragged into court publicly, even for small amounts.

The other caveat is that, procedurally speaking, I’m not sure if the lawyers here would be able to re-bring cases against defendants that got the originals dismissed due to a failure to register in time. In terms of the registration rule, yes, you can bring a suit for earlier infringements, but that’s a separate question from whether you can sue the same person again once you’ve fixed the previous registration problem. I don’t happen to know that answer at the moment.

Hope this info’s helpful.

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