Please be aware that I am not an attorney or trying here to give any legal advice on this subject, just expressing my opinion here which hopefully will be of any help.
Now about the copyright issue, a lot of people think that doing a copyright for some artwork will be hard, costly and confusing; In other hand is generally know that only by posting online some artwork on a web page is enough to prove ownership on a work which in my understanding is true. So this two situations makes the perfect environment for some artists to not to bother them self to copyright their work.
So with that said, let me share my opinion with this two ideas:
1. It´s better to play safe: imagine that you have this really cool design over your website that is very popular and one day you discover that your design is been used for years by a small company on the other side of the united stated and by this point they had made a lot of money with it. You of course never bothered doing copyright of your work… but say: well I can prove it´s my work!!! Are you sure?
a. What if you din´t kept proper track of when/where you publish your work for the first time?
b. What is the site have a problem and your work is deleted after a couple of years? If you publish again, it wont have the previous date.
c. What if you service provider that host your page or blog crash or is shutdown and all you published work is gone?
Now imagine that not only any of this happens but also this company has the copyright of your work because they stole it from you and had it copyrighted under their name. So now we have a company who owns the copyright of a design, and a guy elsewhere who says the work is his but have no way to prove it. What do you thing it´s going to happen?
2. It´s not that much of a problem: The United States Copyright Office has a very helpful and easy to understand web site for copyright, once you go there you can find info about the kind of work you are registering for copyright, you just have to create and account, log in & follow the instructions. It´s not even costly since 2D artwork can be summited online and the fee (up to this date) is $30 per transaction. You don’t even have to pay the $30 fee for each design, since you can compile all your work and copyright a “volume” of your artwork, so if you have 20 drawings to copyright, you can have the 20 drawings done for the same $30 fee.
For more info about copyright and how to do it go to the link:
So in my opinion you should always Copyright your work, and I know that publishing online is generally accepted as “safe”, but I am a the kind of person who think that is best to be sure.
All the images on this site are property of Daniel Alfaro and/or their respective owners and cannot be used without the proper permission.