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So, a few months ago I posted this blog entry: The Copyright Chronicles. In it I detailed my ongoing frustrations with what should have hopefully been a fairly straightforward process of officially registering a copyright with the U.S. government.
I mean, yeah, I brought it on myself. I’ve talked many times about how copyright protection is automatically established as soon as a given work is produced in “fixed form.” You really don’t need to do anything beyond the act of creation unless you imagine that someday you might be suing someone for infringement and hoping to get monetary compensation out of the decision.
Do I think that will happen with Zombie Ranch? To be perfectly honest, I hope not, but some deep-seated masochistic urge led me to delve into the experience of formal copyright registration. It was supposed to be a matter of electronic filing, a $55 application fee, and a wait of 6-8 months for processing, at the end of which we would receive our certificate. I think it would have if we weren’t trying to register our trade paperback collection, but because we were our filing tripped over the problem of “previously published material.”
Now in terms of formal registration, there still appears to be no clear consensus on whether publishing artwork and text digitally counts as prior publication, which is really weird when you think about just how many major magazines and newspapers have gone 100% digital in this age, much less webcomics. But regardless the fact is we published seven individual issues in print before gathering them in the trade. So… yeah, that’s rather unequivocally a “previously published” situation. Even though we never pursued formal registration for those issues, it disqualified the content from being formally registered now, even in the circumstance of the alterations we made such as resizing and relettering. If there *was* previously unpublished material in the collection, that could be registered, but I would have to itemize and specifically detail what to include and exclude in the scope.
So, while I briefly toyed with the notion of just giving up, I eventually did knuckle down and do exactly what they asked, going through every last bit of the book and noting what parts had not previously seen print publication. And while the back and forth turnaround on that still took several weeks, as of last week I was finally informed that the registration was approved and we should receive our certificate within two months.
Two months?!
Well, after over a year of waiting and wrangling, I suppose what was a few more weeks? And yet, in a strange departure from the previous pacing, we instead received our certificate in two days. It’s not as impressive as I imagined it would be, but it’s official. And heck, there it is online, searchable and everything!
Not sure this is ever worth going through again, but Zombie Ranch: a Tale of a Weird New West now at last has its spot in the Library of Congress archives.
Cool.