However, as we have discussed before, the registration system does not fit neatly with the realities of the Web and even their new electronic system does not bring the service up to modern standards.

Still, some Webmasters may benefit from registering their works with the USCO and should consider doing so. However, registering every work is impractical and most Webmasters will gain nothing at all from a registration, no matter how frequently they do ti.

So when should a Webmaster register their work with the USCO? It’s a difficult question with no easy answers.

The Limitations to Understand

Though the advantages of a USCO registration are great, there are two limitations to such registrations that limit their usefulness to webmasters.

1. Registration has no impact on the most common copyright infringement resolution techniques (DMCA Notices, Cease and Desists, etc.)
2. It only applies to works included in the registration, not ones that came later.

These elements combine to virtually guarantee that any registration you file for your site will be useless.

You will not require a formal registration in well over 99.9% of all of your copyright disputes and, in the rare times where it might be useful, it likely will not apply. Since newer works, for most sites, are the ones more commonly infringed, the odds of the works involved being covered by your registration are slim.

The only way to keep your copyright registration relevant on a site that is active is to constantly re-register your site. However, that comes both at a high cost to one’s time and to one’s bottom line. If you register your site every three months, as some recommend, it would cost $140, even using the cheaper online service.

However, even with that system, since copyright law does not consider merely posting a work to the Web publication, but rather public display, most works posted to the Web are not eligible for the three-month grace period of registration.

Update: See this comment for more information about the issue of public display vs. publication as it pertains to the copyright registration process. Many thanks to Matt Saunders for the clarification.

This, in turn, means that at any given time, would have a three-month gap in your registration, where the newer works would not be eligible for protection until the next cycle begins. During that time, infringement of new works is ongoing.

In short, even if you took every reasonable precaution possible and spent the time and money to keep your registration up to date, you would still leave gaping holes where you would not be eligible for full protection of your work, likely until it is too late.

Exceptions to the Rule

This isn’t to say that there are no cases where a site might benefit from a copyright registration, just that most sites will not. There are at least a few situations where a webmaster can and should seriously consider making use of the USCO’s service.

However, those cases would typically be limited to sites that meet the following criteria:

1. Static Sites: Sites where the content remains largely constant or, at the very least, see a large amount of misuse of older works may benefit from registration as there is a good probability that any infringement will be of a protected work.
2. Ability and Will to Sue: Suing for copyright infringement takes a great deal of time and money. Even if you are able to recoup the costs of the suit, the energy expended may not be worth the results. You need to make sure that you are willing to go through a long, protracted legal fight that could end up going nowhere, especially if the party is in another country or can’t pay any penalties. Most people and many businesses are in no position to do that.
3. Financial Reasons to Sue: Though there are many reasons to sue for copyright infringement, courts put the most weight on the monetary damages as it is what they can most easily assess. It is important to note that damages awarded for infringement are statutory, not punitive, and thus will be related to the value of the work itself.

If you have a dynamic site and/or lack the ability or reason to actively sue infringers, most likely, a copyright registration is a waste of time and money.

The question then becomes a matter of which sites meet the criteria and become good targets for registration? The answer is surprisingly few.

Sites that Should Consider Registering

If you and your site meet the above criteria, then registering your site is probably a wise move. However, if you are looking for examples of the types of sites and content that should be registered, consider the ones below:

1. Art/Literature Sites: Content on art and literature sites tend to have longer shelf lives than those on blogs or news sites. Works on those are much more likely to be infringed after a registration is filed than on other dynamic sites.
2. Business Sites: Though a competitor copying your marketing or promotional material raises other legal issues, including unfair competition, it may be worthwhile to register the site since a great deal of time and money goes into it. Furthermore, the content, typically, does not change much making it likely that a protected work will be infringed.
3. Stand-alone Works: Any work that takes a decent amount of time and/or money to create should, if possible, be registered before it is posted to the Web. Novels, movies, music compilations, etc. should, if possible, be registered regardless of the type of site they are to be posted to.

But while these works, and others that warrant registration, may seem to cover most of the Web, the truth is that very little of the content on the Web is registered and only a small percentage of that content benefits from their more official status.

Your average blogger or Webmaster has little, if any, reason to consider registering their site with the USCO.

Foreign Authors

To take a quick aside, it is worth noting that authors in countries outside of the U.S. stand to gain very little from registering their works.

While there is some debate whether or not a foreign-born author can sue without first registering a work (Note: I am seeking clarification on this issue and will update when I get a reply), the issue is moot since, in most cases, the cost and expense of suing in a United States court would far exceed any potential gains.

Foreign authors, both legally and practically, have the least to gain from copyright registration.

Conclusions

If the question is whether or not one should register their Web page or blog with the United States Copyright Office, the answer will usually be “No”.

Though there are exceptions to the rule, there are very few sites that would significantly benefit from registering their work. The nature of the Web and the limitations of the registration system make it so that, for most webmasters, a USCO registration is a waste of both time and money.

Fortunately, most of the protections we rely upon as webmasters are ours from the moment our work is fixed into a tangible medium of expression and do not require a copyright registration. DMCA notices and desist letters are all available to us with no formalities at all.

Even if a major copyright dispute were to arise, one could likely leverage copyright management information (CMI) to sue for a previously unregistered work. Though that avenue is limited and controversial, it may provide an avenue for when registration was impossible or impractical.

However, the bottom line is U.S. copyright law does not effectively protect bloggers and others who post content to the Web. Our copyright protection is second rate to the rest of the world and, until the law changes, many of us will have our best legal avenues closed off.

The flaw is not with bloggers unwilling to protect their works, but with a system that is out of touch with realities of the Web.

The system, which is currently in beta, drew very little praise and seemed to be plagued with problems including technical, usability and speed issues.

However, in that review, I had been unable to complete a registration due to a lack of need and uncertainties about the system, leaving the review somewhat incomplete.

Earlier this week, I got the chance to complete the process as I returned to file a registration, thus giving me the chance to walk through the payment and upload process.

Unfortunately, the new experiences with the system did nothing to improve my opinion of the service and, instead, only worsened my already sour opinion of the ECO service.

Payment

When you reach the end of your registration process, before you are allowed to upload your work, you are required to pay the $35 fee for registration.

Unfortunately, the system for filing your payment is unnecessarily complex and is confusing, even for someone who regularly purchases items on the Web.

To initiate the process, you can choose to either pay with your USCO deposit account, which requires prior setup, or with your credit card/bank account.

However, clicking the “Credit Card/ACH” button takes you to a screen with nothing but the ACH information on it. The page, which is hosted on the pay.gov Web site, a site run by the U.S. Treasury, asks for your ban account and checking information first, pushing the more familiar credit card payment off of the screen, even on larger monitors.

This resulted in an extended period of confusion trying to find the credit card form with no luck. It was only on the third try that, out of frustration, I scrolled down to find it.

However, once the information was put through, things did not improve. I was then asked to enter my email address to receive a confirmation letter of the transaction. Unfortunately, you also have to agree to a terms of service for the registration and the tick mark to agree is to the right of the “I agree” sentence, not the left.

Even if you read the text on the page very carefully, it is easy to miss the checkbox and and receive an error message when submitting the form and, even when warned of the mistake, it can be hard to locate the box.

Though these might seem like minor usability issues, they turned what should have been a two or three minutes credit card purchase into a twenty minute ordeal. In the time it took me to figure out how to pay for the registration, I likely could have filled out the Short Form TX (PDF), burned the CD and written a check.

However, the ordeal did not end there. With payment secured, I was then forced to upload the work itself. But with other reviews hinting at problems with the upload process, this was easily the part I was most worried about, especially considering that the USCO already had my money and the amount was non-refundable.

Uploading

The file I was registering was a zip file approximately 100 MB in size and contained and entire Web site with images and text. I debated, based upon information I had read, breaking the file up into two parts but decided to first try the file in one shot.

Fortunately, the process went relatively smoothly. After selecting the file and giving it a title, an upload dialog box appeared and it started to transmit the file to the service.

Of all the elements to the registration process, this was the only part that struck me as remotely modern. The dialog box updated in close to real time, provided an accurate estimate of time remaining and a good approximation of upload speed.

Through the entire process, I had upload speeds of about 67 KB per second and the file took roughly 20 minutes to upload. Though it is a respectable speed, I’ve achieved much faster uploads over IM and FTP but the process was still far from sluggish or painful.

Then, once the upload finished, I received confirmation in my “case listing”. However, the case was not “closed” or marked complete. Rather, it was marked as “open” and the claim status was changed to “pending”.

Even after everything that was done, the process is not automatic and still requires human review. before the registration is finalized.

This is, perhaps, the biggest single blow to the ECO system. that all it really is is a means to same end as the mail-in system. However, rather than mailing your form and sample works in, you get to send them electronically via clunky, error-prone interface that is slower and more confusing than its paper counterparts.

Technical Errors

Something that emerged in this use of the ECO system that was not present during my earlier experiments was a slew of server and Web page errors.

It seemed that, as I went through the system, every other page produced some variation of the “server busy” error. The other sites I was on at the time functioned well, including the main USCO Web site, and the errors seemed to be limited exclusively to anything on the ECO system that required the running of a script.

Given that the ECO system is, technically, in a private beta, this is embarrassing. If they are having issues with server load, they could, theoretically, just reduce the number of people allowed to register for the service until they get caught up.

Unfortunately, they either haven’t done that or did it too late. The system seems to be getting pounded now and, if it moves at all, it does so reluctantly.

The good news is that these slowdowns didn’t affect upload speed significantly and the errors did not cause any data loss. The system was smart enough to pick up where it left off every time.

Still, it made for more than a few “heart stopping” moments.

Conclusions

The premise of the ECO system is that, when compared to the current mail-in system, it is supposed to be faster, cheaper and more reliable. Unfortunately, it fails miserably on two out of three accounts.

Though the system will save you ten dollars plus postage on your registration, you’ll spend more time filling out the forms and put up with a very buggy system in order to make it happen. Though I’m certain later registrations will be easier for me as it should have all of my data stored, there is no excuse for making this system more complicated than the one it is supposed to replace.

However, even with that being said, I will probably find myself using the ECO system in the future, so long as the current registration goes through in a reasonable amount of time. Though I don’t register many works due to the nature of the Web, if I have to do it, this will likely be the way to go.

The reason though has nothing to do with the ECO system itself, but with issues I’ve had in recent months trying to submit deposit copies. Twice now I have had burned CDs ether be destroyed or lost by the USCO. At least with electronic registration, that is not an issue.

However, if this is the system that is supposed to bring the archaic USCO into the 21st century, it is a dismal failure. Between the dated technology that doesn’t work properly, poor usability and a sheer complexity of the process, this system only shows how out of step the USCO is with the modern world.

It is long overdue for the USCO’s place in the copyright landscape to be re-evaluated and changed. The failure of the ECO system to provide a decent registration system only serves as the nail in the coffin of that argument.