Copyright is the right most often assumed and least often checked. It attaches automatically when a work is fixed — the code, the design, the copy, the photograph — which makes it easy to believe nothing further is required. Two things routinely prove that wrong.

The first is ownership. Work created by an employee within the scope of employment generally belongs to the employer. Work created by an independent contractor generally does not — it belongs to the contractor unless there is a written assignment. Businesses discover this during diligence, which is the worst possible moment, and the fix requires the cooperation of someone who no longer has any reason to cooperate.

The second is registration timing. Registration is not what creates the copyright, but it is a precondition to bringing an infringement suit over a U.S. work, and registering early rather than after the problem appears affects which remedies are available at all. Timing is therefore a decision, not paperwork.

Then there are the questions with no clean answer — what a license actually permitted, whether a use is fair, what happens when work is built on someone else's foundation, and how much of a work a tool can produce before there is too little human authorship left to protect. Those are worth thinking about before they are contested.