I want to add a few words about databases. As the Copyright Office sees it, a web site is emphatically not a database even though it may contain one or more, but a brief discussion might be useful.
Formally and for the purposes of copyright, a database is an organized set of facts, data, or other information recorded in a consistent format, with the implication that it can be used by a computer. If the database contains only data that is automatically generated, it can't be copyrighted: so if for some reason you have generated a list of the square roots to 50 decimal places of all the prime numbers up to a million, don't bother trying. It must contain original information created by the author, just as in any other copyrightable work. This, however, may consist of work "formed by the collection and assembling of pre-existing materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship". (Quoted from the Copyright Office's Circular 65, which in turn quotes from the relevant portion of the Copyright Act.) So the original information can be genuinely never-before-seen data, or a new way of arranging previously existing data. All this is relevant if you want to think about copyrighting a standalone database, but in the more likely case that it's contained within your web site it doesn't apply.
Still, there are the usual advantages in registering a copyright on a database; and protecting updates by registering the changes once every three months is also worth considering.
The procedure to register a database for copyright for the first time is fairly simple: use the long Form TX and provide the deposit material as specified in Circular 65. Adding a copyright for updates is quite a circus, though: there is a distinction between a single update — a flock of updates done on a single day in the past three months — and a group update — updates done in the last three months but on multiple dates.
I hadn't intended to touch on this topic at all when I first planned this guide, but on reading one of the other circulars I got the impression that it might be possible to register a frequently updated web site as a database. I had in mind, in particular, blogs. But a conversation with an actual person at the Copyright Office gave an unequivocal answer: no. If your site, whatever you consider its nature to be, contains anything but raw facts, it isn't a database.
<< Previous Page: Filling Out the Copyright Registration Form When Updating the Registration
>> Next Page: What to Do if Your Site Has Been Copied
Table of Contents