Originally Posted by
ghostrider
Relax, Kristi clearly stated that it's the registration of the copyright that has the fee attached, not the copyright itself. It is your choice to register so that you can defend your copyright against infringement in court if/when necessary. Absent that registration, you still have the copyright on your original work, you just can't easily bring suit to defend it. You pay for the protection of the rights, not for the rights themselves. What Kristi said was perfectly clear and correct.
Actually, you CAN defend your copyright against infringement in court without registration - it's as easy as posting it to a blog that you keep private, that time and date stamps the post. I found this out several years ago when a photo that a photographer friend of mine had taken was used on a public billboard. He was able to force the company to remove the photo by proving that he had posted the photo himself and owned the original file when the company couldn't produce a release. In this digital age, it is very easy to validate copyright, just by keeping a blog.