David Ludwig,Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig PLLC via JDSupra Why Copyright Registration Matters
"Creative works of expression are likely your most valuable assets if you are a film studio, photographer, software developer, writer, musician, or visual artist. To fully protect against copycats, you need federal copyright registration...
If you are a copyright owner and you succeed in a lawsuit, you will be entitled to recover actual damages: whatever you lost because of the infringement of your copyright. This can be a hard number to calculate.
However, if you are the owner of a registered copyright, you can choose to receive statutory damages instead of actual damages. Courts can award between $750 and $30,000 for each infringement of a copyrighted work. If the infringement was willful, meaning the defendant deliberately used your work despite knowing it was copyrighted, you can recover up to $150,000. The right choice of which type of damages to pursue will depend on whether and when you registered your copyright and how easy it is to calculate your damages.
Keep in mind that if you registered your copyright before the infringement, you will also be eligible to recover attorneys’ fees and litigation costs from the infringer."
