Speaker 1: All right, Max Levine here from the law offices of Max Levine. I think this is our fourth video on copyright, and as always, these videos are not legal advice. They're general background information. So we're going to make two videos today, number four and number five, and these are probably the most important videos that I'm going to make on copyright, and they're going to answer two simple questions. So today's video is going to answer the question of why is copyright a powerful tool, legal tool to help you get paid, which is what I've been saying over and over, and the next video is going to be, hey, what do you need to do as someone who creates content that's subject to copyright in order to get that powerful tool to work for you? So today, why copyright is so powerful, the magic words are statutory damages and attorney's fees. So just stick with me. Remember those two phrases, statutory damages and attorney's fees, and we're going to work with an example. Okay, so let's say you're a photographer, you do some work for a client, you create a holiday card, a business holiday card for this business, and you specify in your agreement with them how much you're going to get paid and what they're allowed to use the work for. And let's forget about copyright law. Let's just talk about contract law. You have an agreement with them. You say, hey, we're going to do this work for you. You're going to pay us this amount, and by the way, you can only use that image that we create for you in your business holiday card. Okay, now that client goes ahead and completely breaches the contract. You are driving on I-95, very important down here in South Florida. You look up at the billboard. It's not an air conditioning company. It's not a personal injury attorney. It's actually your client using your image on a billboard, clearly in violation of your contract. Okay, now you bring this, this, you know, you take a picture of the billboard. You bring your contract, and you come to an attorney and say, hey, I want to sue. This is a clear violation, this clear breach of my contract. And now we're talking about contract law. So the attorney looks at your contract, looks at the billboard, and kind of comes back to you and says, okay, it seems pretty clear there's a breach of this contract. But now we've got to figure out damages, okay? How much did this breach of the contract actually harm you in dollars and cents? That is not easy to tell, okay? Proving that as a factual matter, it may require hiring expert witnesses, right? It's really kind of hard to wrap your head around how much that breach is actually worth to you. So now you kind of got this chicken and egg situation with the attorney. The attorney probably wants to work on the case but doesn't know how much the case is worth and doesn't know that any award is actually going to be sufficient to cover his or her fees. So maybe they want to charge you up front, maybe they want to charge you a little bit more. It's going to be difficult to actually get a qualified attorney to defend your rights, okay? So US Congress kind of understood that this was the problem, that particularly for claims that might be small, like a single photograph being misused in a certain way, and even for a claim that might be substantial, like a billboard, it's kind of hard to get over those issues of defending your rights effectively. So they did two things to kind of fix it and they kind of work. They said that if you can prove infringement and if you protected your rights from the get-go, and again, that's what we're going to talk about in the next video, you automatically get attorney's fees and statutory damages. And let's talk about what those things mean. So attorney's fees, it's pretty much what you think it is. It's your reasonable attorney's fees, okay? So your attorney has to keep track of their time and their expenses and kind of submit that to the court. And if you can prove that the infringement occurred, you are not paying for your lawyer. The infringer is paying for your lawyer, okay? That's how it works. Again, assuming you took those steps that you needed to take. Statutory damages means, similarly, if there was an infringement, you do not have to prove the exact amount of the damages to you as a factual matter in court. The judge or the jury just figures out a number on their own and that is the amount of the damages, okay? If you can prove the infringement, you get paid. Actually if you can prove will for infringement, you get paid even more, up to $150,000 per infringement, okay? So we're talking about very real money. So now let's go back to our case, okay? And let's say, yeah, you do have a contract claim but you did all those things that you need to do to protect your work under copyright and now you have a copyright claim that can be asserted in federal court, okay? So now you're in a very different situation, okay? That lawyer wants to work on this case for you, right? Because the evidence of the infringement is right there and you've got automatic attorney's fees. So even if you may only get $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 on the case, it's still worth it for the lawyer to put some time into the case for sure because that infringer is paying that bill no matter what. It's not something that you have to decide whether to do even on a smaller claim. And again, you don't have to go through that whole phase of the trial of proving the amount of the damages which may require, again, hiring expert witnesses, battling it out with the infringer's expert witnesses and then hoping that the judge or the jury comes to a sensible result. No. There's automatic damages. That's what statutory damages means. So the case itself is a lot simpler for you to collect on. So now you and that lawyer can work together effectively to defend your rights even if the claim is fairly small, okay? So what this means is one kind of additional implication is that your case may not even need to go to trial at all. In fact, the law is so on your side if you do those things to protect your rights and copyright that when that lawyer calls the infringer and says, hey, you have an infringement situation here under copyright law. We're going to come after you for statutory damages and attorney's fees. Go call your lawyer and find out how much of a mistake you just made. When that former client in this billboard situation calls their attorney, the attorney says, yeah, listen, the law is on their side. It looks like they did do the appropriate steps to protect their rights. This is just an expensive lesson that you're going to have to learn. You should settle the case. Now the attorney gets some attorney's fees. You get paid without even having to go to court, even in a shorter trial, right? If you went to court, it would have been simpler than under a contract claim because the law is so on your side if you take these steps that copyright law can be such a powerful tool for you to get paid when a client infringes on your work. Now again, this could be a situation where the client puts that image, uses that image in a way that you didn't allow, like puts it on a billboard in our case of the holiday card, or maybe they didn't pay their final bill, right, and they still used your work. And if you took those steps in copyright, that itself is an infringement of your rights under copyright law. You can go after that client for more than that final bill, okay, because the statutory damages may be worth more than whatever the final invoice they didn't pay, okay? And you may even be able to settle for that amount as well. So that's kind of the magic of copyright law, that it makes the case so much simpler and makes the law so much more on your side and gives you the advantage of the infringer paying the attorney's fees instead of you trying to have to figure that out from the get-go and maybe never pursuing the case at all. All of that means that if you take the steps that we're going to talk about in the next video, your rights under copyright are so much more powerful than they are under other forms of law.