Copyright Protection -- How to Register Photographs

Addendum to: "THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR USING OUR PICTURES Part I"; "THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR USING OUR PICTURES Part II"; "Blogs, Photo and Copyright:"Hey, I drove that Porsche Boxster for two days, but frankly, I didn´t want to use it, I just wanted to make advertisement for Porsche!"; "Blogs, Photo and Copyright: The debate continues [Copyright => Garbage?]"

The Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) has released "Copyright Protection -- How to Register Photographs". There are several parts of the complete document [Download Link, doc-file] available for download:

I. Copyright: An Overview
II. The History of Copyright Protection
III. The Rights of a Copyright Owner
IV. The Importance of Copyright Registration
V. Digital Armor: Protecting Your Photographs Using Technology

and also -- very useful -- a "Copyright Education Instructional Powerpoint Presentation" ("Members are encouraged to use and adapt this PowerPoint presentation for educating clients and students on copyright and proper licensing") [Link to the .ppt-file]. For all the people out there who are pissed to work with PowerPoint and don´t own an Apple (Keynote), here are the key facts from page 9 until 13:

What rights does the owner control?
Rights to:
make copies of the work;
distribute copies of the work;
perform the work publicly (such as for plays, film, or music);
display the work publicly (such as for artwork, or any material used on the internet or television); and
make “derivative works” (including making modifications, adaptations or other new uses of a work, or translating the work to another media).

Limitations
the "Fair Use" doctrine allows limited copying of copyrighted works for educational and research purposes. The copyright law provides that reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research" is not an infringement of copyright.

What is Fair Use
class handouts of very short excerpts from a book;
quoting for purposes of reporting the news or criticizing or commenting on a particular work of art, writing, speech or scholarship.

What is not Fair Use
using a photograph or other image to illustrate a newsworthy story (because the subject of the story is newsworthy it does not make the image newsworthy)

Example of Fair Use
class studying an artist using samples to critique and analyze his/her work;
making a collage for a school project;
manipulating an image to learn Photoshop or other software.

Comments

[hood]

Am I able to use photographs that I take of objects such as, coffee mugs, tea cups, plates, etc. and use them on greeting cards. These mugs have flowers, old time advertisements, and other decorations on them.

[Finn]

Most of the statements on copyright registration are wrong and not supported by case law. almost no one registers anymore.

You absolutely can recover court costs for example even with unregistered material.