Steve Smith
Member
That's, where the copyright registration comes in: if you as a victim can claim statuory damages and legal fees, it suddenly becomes worth your lawyers time to pursue this in court.
But in the UK we can still claim for statutory damages. The registration you have isn't a right to get increased damages, it's just another method of proving the image is yours - hopefully a foolproof one. Although what's to stop someone downloading another person's image and registering it as their own? If they got their fraudulent registration in before the photographer made his legitimate registration then the system would work against the legitimate copyright owner.
And I wouldn't personally bother with using a lawyer.
Steve.