I don't see the big deal. First of all, the fee has been reduced to about $35 for online registration. So if copyright infringement is that important to you, then just register your blog posts. The registration requirement is not there to help big corporations but to create proof that you had control of a the thing that is allegedly copyrighted at a certain date.
The US legislature decided that in order to fairly charge statutory damages, it should at least have some evidentiary certainty to when something was copyrighted. So the registration requirement was created to provide some certainty.
The fee seems proportional to the costs of running the whole registration scheme by the library of congress. So it is not there to punish you for being poor.
If you really care about your blogs being registered I can suggest a couple of tricks:
- register a bunch of blog entries together. For example you can register a whole year of blogging as a single work.
- You can not register all your blog posts, but if you see someone stealing something from you, register the thing they stole. They will probably continue the copyright violation after your registration.
(PS while I am a lawyer, none of the above is legal advice and no client attorney relationship is created.)
If you register your whole years posts as one work then a large excerpt from one post would probably not be a significant part of that whole work. Copying of an insubstantial part usually rules out the copying as being commercial - this is where lawyers earn their fee, what is an substantial part?
In the worst circumstances I can see such a registration meaning you get no damages at all as it supports the copiers claim that the amount copied is not enough to be commercial damaging.
The US legislature decided that in order to fairly charge statutory damages, it should at least have some evidentiary certainty to when something was copyrighted. So the registration requirement was created to provide some certainty.
The fee seems proportional to the costs of running the whole registration scheme by the library of congress. So it is not there to punish you for being poor.
If you really care about your blogs being registered I can suggest a couple of tricks:
- register a bunch of blog entries together. For example you can register a whole year of blogging as a single work.
- You can not register all your blog posts, but if you see someone stealing something from you, register the thing they stole. They will probably continue the copyright violation after your registration.
(PS while I am a lawyer, none of the above is legal advice and no client attorney relationship is created.)