Copyright law is the principal system for protecting authors’ creations. It confers rights without requiring any other action, but in order to fully benefit from the law authors and parties to whom copyrights have been assigned or sold have to record their copyrights with the Copyright Office. Recordation is the key to protection. Once that step is taken the Copyright Act contains a set of statutory tools for combating infringement ranging from maintaining lawsuits in federal court to serving take-down notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Copyright infringement, however, is not the only form of predatory conduct directed against authors and rights owners. . . . Independent Publisher