This article will give you a basic overview of these topics as well as some links which will assist you in registering your copyrights. However, if a work is not registered, the owner of the rights may not bring an action for copyright infringement until such time as the copyright has been registered. Another reason to register is so that the author can recover statutory damages and attorney's fees and costs. This could be important considering that litigating a copyright is an expensive proposition and actual damages may be difficult to prove.
Registration is usually a straightforward process.
However, since the emergence of the web as a popular form of publishing things have become quite complicated. This ambiguity notwithstanding, the Copyright Office has not rejected any applications for web sites on this basis. There are many parts to software, almost all of them copyrightable. The HTML code is not the sort of program that is converted into machine code. The Copyright Office states that a work should be registered according to what the predominant aspect of the work is.