In the June 2005 edition of New Jersey Buisness Magazine, Craig Hilliard, Chair of the firm’s Intellectual Property group, discusses the importance of registering copyrights. An excerpt from Reaping the Benefits of Your Copyright Assets is below:

The Importance of Registration Though in 1998 Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended the term of copyright protection an additional 20 years, and that same year passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that created civil and criminal penalties for the circumvention of digital rights management, “Congress has been reluctant to tamper with the basic provisions of the copyright laws,” says Craig S. Hilliard, shareholder at Lawrenceville-based Stark & Stark. “The core provisions of the federal law have remained largely unchanged in the last few decades. The major changes today are what is being copyrighted and why.” The “what” here includes a wide variety of items, not just the better known literary works, music and films – though you can still not copyright such everyday things as names, short phrases and slogans, or even some information quite important to a company such as lists of customers, prices and vendors.