The first things that you have to know is that dealing with someone who has stolen your copyright is not time consuming or expensive. It is not complicated. The problem in fact can be solved very easy and quickly. Furthermore it is not obligatory to have a lawyer’s assistance. But it is important for you to be educated and know your rights.

After you have educated yourself about your rights you have to identify the thief. Track down the person by contact name, address, e-mail or any information that you have about him. Even if you Google him it is absolutely possible to find the information that you need about him.

Once you have identified your thief you have to contact him. Let him know that he has done an intellectual theft. Very often people do not realize that they have stolen a work protected by copyright. Most of them use the intellectual objects for granted and even do not know about the copyright. It is important to request cessation of the illegal activities or/and compensation.

There is another thing that you can do before starting court dispute. Send to the copyright thief a Cease and Desist Order. A Cease and Desist Order is a formal legal letter. Very often this legal document solves the case. The Cease and Desist Order has a notification of the copyright infringement and the theft of intellectual property.  You have to demand that the thief must cease and desist from infringing your copyrights. Demand to remove and destroy the stolen content. Demand compensation for all the profits and income derived from the copyright and compensation due to your lost profits. With that letter the thief finally understands that you are absolutely serious and you will do anything to protect your right. You clearly state you will take further legal action if he does not stop with the infringement.

If the contact with the thief did not solve the problem you should prepare yourself for court trail. You have to be ready to prove that you are the author of the stolen works. For establishing your ownership start gathering proves that you are the original owner of the copyright. Gather copies of the unedited works with a file date. Gather notes with dates that you have made while you were creating your work. Find witnesses who can testify that you have made that work and you are the original author. Register your work. Get a copy of the registration license from the U.S. Copyright Office. Prepare as many proves as possible.

There are several ways to prove that you are the author. They can be generalized in two groups. The first group is the registration in the U.S. Copyright Office. And the second is a group of all the other ways of proving the copyright - the group of “poor-man’s copyright”.

What exactly means “poor-mans copyright”?  The practice of sending a copy of your own work to yourself is called  “poor man’s copyright”. Mailing your work to yourself and keeping the unopened and postmarked envelope as proof of right of ownership has no substantive legal effect in the United States. Such mail may serve to establish how long you have possessed the ownership of the work, but since the postmarked and sealed envelope could be so easily circumvented, it is very doubtful that it can serve as a proof. Courts would pay no regard to such evidence as a reliable one.

There is another option of sending to you the created work - by email or another digital way. But as it has been proved the Internet data bases are rather easy to circumvent and hack. That is way no court of law is willing to take in to account such proof.

The third way of the second group is variation of “poor-man’s copyright”. Again it is self-mailing but the envelope is sealed with the signs and stamps of notary. It is made as notary act and it is kept as a copy in the notary protocols.

This is in theory the most common ways of using the “poor-man’s copyright”. There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection and it is not a substitute for registration. It is not yet located a case of its use where an author’s copyright is established and successfully defended in a court by those methods.

The “poor-man’s copyright” proves the date at which you have gain access to that work, how long you have possessed that work. Court disputes are not about who possess something first - those are the patent disputes. Copyright disputes are about who created the work. “Poor-man’s copyright” proves only that you had access to the work from the postmarked date but it does not mean that you have created this work. It is highly recommended to register your work in U.S. Copyright Office if you want to gain good proves in a future law dispute and it only worth 30-35$ and can be done trough Internet in insignificant amount of time.

The “poor-man’s copyright” does not give you protection for copyright infringement. Its overall coast is little cheaper than the registration in the Copyright Office. If the “poor-man’s copyright” is a proof it is a “regular” one and the registration is a “special” one - in the law there is a rule that the “special” act overrule the “regular”, so you will have to spend a lot of money for lawyer and court disputes to find more “regular” proves to beat the registration in the U.S. Copyright Office. So save your money when you act professionally and register you work.

Poor man’s copyright was a different and unique way of proving the ownership generally implemented by some poor class of people, especially musicians. In this method, the owner sends his own work as mail to his own mail box or also submits his work to bank or attorney to prove his rights and ownership to avoid the cost of getting it copyrighted in a traditional manner. Though, poor man’s copyright is not identified by the commission it still proves beneficial in some cases and is identified in Britain and Netherlands.