Short Online Literary Works - Creative Law Center

Short Online Literary Works

Copyright Protection for Short Online Literary Works [Replay]

Sharing creative work online is how authors, artists, and creative businesses market their work. It is how audiences are built. Audiences that turn into customers.

Businesses call it content marketing. Creative professionals call it platform building.

Do you share your written work online? On your blog, in social media, on Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, WattPad?

A lot of creativity goes into drafting those short pieces of work. Not to mention time.

How do you protect the original work that you’ve shared?

Until now,  there has been no easy and affordable way to protect short online work with the Copyright Office.

Even though the terms of use for Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Twitter prohibit copyright infringement, copied posts are rarely taken down even when a complaint has been filed. Infringers did not face the consequences of what amounts to theft.

There was little to no recourse for original creators.

Until now.

Until now, you couldn’t group together a bunch of blog posts, for instance, and protect them by filing one copyright application with one filing fee. You had to file an application for each post. And pay $35 each. If you write blog posts every week, that’s $1,820 a year.

Too much money.

That has changed.

The Copyright Office has released a new application for protecting Groups of Online Literary Work. That’s what written social media and blog posts are — online literary work — if they are over 50 words long. Product descriptions that are over 50 words may be considered literary work, as well.

Now you can protect your short online work with the force of a copyright registration.

In this workshop, we review the new Copyright Application for Groups of Online Literary Work. This new application will become a cornerstone for protecting content marketing campaigns, social media and blog posts, online articles, product descriptions, and maybe even jokes. It will make protecting short pieces of online work more efficient, more effective, and less expensive than it has been in the past.

This innovation coming out of the Copyright Office is long overdue. They’ve finally found a solution to a protection problem that’s been around for years. But the new application is here now and it’s time to scoop up your online work and get it protected.

The Copyright Application for Groups of Online Literary Work (GRTX) is not exactly a thing of beauty (nothing in the Copyright Office is). It’s only been around since October 29, 2020. But we’ve broken it down in this workshop to make it work for you.

Learn how to protect your online work with this Copyright Application (GRTX) because a Copyright Registration Certificate is a powerful enforcement tool in the online world.

About the Author

Kathryn Goldman helps small business people, writers, artists, and creative professionals make a living from their creative work by teaching them how to protect and enforce their rights. She is an attorney who writes these posts to help you be more thoughtful about intellectual property and the law as you build your business, write your stories, and create your art.

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