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I am lightly horrified by how many people have now looked up their books and found out their publishers (who often were required contractually!!!!) just... didn't register the copyrights on books. Not all of them! Just sporadically! This is not just one publisher, I've seen all the big ones now.

This is surprising to me (as an author whose work was used illegally by anthropic, and also whose work is apparently not copyrighted). It flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” which says the mere act of publishing something copyrights it. Is there really legally no argument to be made here?

So I guess... if you were published by one of the big guys in the US, don't assume they registered the copyright for all of your books. Go look your books up and find out: publicrecords.copyright.gov

I was fully expecting my Amazon imprint's series to not be there, but they even registered the audiobooks.

Interestingly, two of my books with a big five house appear to be copyrighted as *audio* recordings but not also as fiction? I wonder how that interacts with *gestures to all this*

(because this is getting more attention I'm going to add: maybe there is some esoteric way that all of our books are registered but you just can't find them in the database--I don't know HOW, I was a dba & searched every possible way I could imagine them being misregistered--but it is POSSIBLE?)

(however if you can not find your book in the database it is probably a good idea to reach out to your publisher and ask them if/how they registered it!!! you will need to know if you want to engage in that settlement!)

Foreign books and foreign authors don't need to register in the United States to take action in the U.S. courts. “Congress removed foreign works from Section 411(a)’s dominion in order to comply with the Berne Convention bar on copyright formalities for such works.” Fourth Est., 586 U.S. at 306–07

Yes, please understand that this says “foreign works” and not “foreign authors” and if you read the actual statute implementing it, it is clear that your reading is incorrect.

I have a lot of US authors following me, however!