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rchase in a deed. If you buy a car, you get a bill of sale and register the car. If you buy an airplane ticket, it has your name on it.
These are all formalities associated with property. They are requirements that we all must bear if we want our property to be protected.
In contrast, under current copyright law, you automatically get a copyright, regardless of whether you comply with any formality. You don't have to register. You don't even have to mark your content. The default is control, and "formalities" are banished.
Why?
As I suggested in chapter 10, the motivation to abolish formalities was a good one. In the world before digital technologies, formalities imposed a burden on copyright holders without much benefit. Thus, it was progress when the law relaxed the formal requirements that a copyright owner must bear to protect and secure his work. Those formalities were getting in the way.
But the Internet changes all this. Formalities today need not be a burden. Rather, the world without formalities is the world that burdens creativity. Today, there is no simple way to know who owns what, or with whom one must deal in order to use or build upon the creative work of others. There are no records, there is no system to trace-- there is no simple way to know how to get permission. Yet given the massive increase in the scope of copyright's rule, getting permission is a necessary step for any work that builds upon our past. And thus, the lack of formalities forces many into silence where they otherwise could speak.
The law should therefore change this requirement1--but it should not change it by going back to the old, broken system. We should require formalities, but we should establish a system that will create the incentives to minimize the burden of these formalities.
The important formalities are three: marking copyrighted work, registering copyrights, and renewing the claim to copyright. Traditionally, the first of these three was something th
