this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
309 points (94.5% liked)
Technology
59128 readers
2240 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In the US, you need your copyright to be registered in order to file an infringement suit or be granted statutory damages. This must be done prior to the infringement, so they wouldn't be able to pick and choose which to register after the fact. The fact that (unregistered) copyright arises from the moment of creation is true, but not particularly useful here.
Copyright is not the same as patents or trademarks; someone coincidentally creating something very similar or even an exact replica of your work is not infringement.
If whether you copied from their work or independently made similar choices is under question - then close similarity of the works could skew the balance of probabilities. However, the courts will be able to see that coincidental similarity is far more likely if a colossal number of images have been registered.
It's still copyright infringement even if you publish it non-commercially, but a Fair Use defense would likely hold up.