Copyrights

Copyright protects a work the moment it's fixed in a tangible medium, whether recorded, written, coded, or photographed, but the protection a business can enforce depends on how the rights are owned, registered, licensed, and defended. Hank has counseled creators and companies on copyright from the first ownership question through registration, licensing, and the infringement claims and appeals in which courts determine who controls a work and who profits from it.

Ownership is the first question to resolve, because the person who creates a work isn't always the person who owns it. An employee's work created on the job belongs to the employer under the work-for-hire doctrine. A contractor's work belongs to the contractor unless a written agreement assigns the rights to the commissioning party. A jointly created work may leave each contributor a co-owner who can license the entire work without the others' consent, subject only to a duty to account for any revenue received. Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is a prerequisite to filing suit in federal court. Timely registration, filed before infringement begins or within three months of first publication, entitles the owner to statutory damages ranging from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, up to $150,000 for willful infringement, plus attorney's fees, instead of having to prove actual losses that are often difficult to quantify.

Copyrights earn their value through licensing, and Hank drafts and negotiates exclusive and non-exclusive licenses, assignments, and work-for-hire agreements that transfer rights without surrendering more than the owner intends. Copyright law also lets an author reclaim rights that were signed away. Under Section 203 of the Copyright Act, an author who assigned or exclusively licensed a copyright may terminate that grant decades later and recover the rights, and Hank has litigated Section 203 termination claims through the federal courts of appeals. When someone copies a work without authorization, Hank sends DMCA takedown notices to hosts and platforms, responds to wrongful takedowns filed against clients, and brings or defends infringement suits where the case turns on access, substantial similarity, and fair use.

Hank has handled copyright cases for software companies, recording artists, writers, photographers, and businesses protecting content they paid to create, and he has carried the hardest of those cases through trial and appeal. Every engagement works toward the same result, an owner who knows what rights it owns, what it has licensed, and what it can stop, with the registrations and documentation to prove each one.