Make Registration Part of Your Workflow
The best time to register your work with the U.S. Copyright Office is before it leaves your hands.
What do you want to register?
Any work created in the United States after January 1, 1978 is automatically protected by copyright law. BUT there’s a catch!
Without registration of your work with the Copyright Office, you lose key enforcement tools. And if the party who infringed your work knows this, you lose leverage in trying to negotiate a settlement.
Registration Basics
In copyright law, the creator of any type of work is called an “author.” Works may be authored by individuals or by business entities, and works may be ‘jointly authored” by more than one party. All authors of a work are also copyright claimants in the work unless otherwise stated by written agreement. All works authored by business entities are, as a matter of law, works made for hire.
Works Made for Hire
A legal doctrine that provides the employer who commissions the creation of a work, or in certain cases in which the parties have agreed in writing to consider the work a work made for hire, that the employer/commissioning party is the author of the work (not merely a copyright owner who has obtained rights from the initial author). The Copyright Act provides that a work made for hire will enjoy a term of copyright that lasts 95 years from the date of first publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever is shorter.
Claimants are any owners of a copyrightable work. By default the author is the first claimant, but there may be more than one. For instance, joint authors are typically joint claimants, family members or partners can be claimants by means of a transfer of rights, or publishers et al. who have certain rights may be claimants. Except in the case of authors, a claimant to a work must be the result of contract, written transfer, or inheritance.
NOTE: You need contact information for all claimants.
The Creation Date of a work is the date you completed the version of a work that you intend to register. That said, when preparing to register a group, especially a large group that may have been produced over a long period, the question arises as to how essential it is to specify the exact completion date of each work. Here’s some guidance:
For unpublished works, it is permissible to submit the date of the most recently created work as the Creation Date for the entire group.
For published works, the Copyright Office requires the month and year, so if you remember a publication date of June 15th and it was actually June 13th, that’s okay.
In RightsClick, there are various ways to assign Creation Dates to All or Selected Titles in a given Project.
If you have previously registered an earlier version of a work, this raises two questions: 1) whether it is worthwhile registering the new version as a “derivative work;” and 2) how to properly submit the registration application. For a discussion on this topic, please see our blog about registration of new versions.
The Copyright Office and RightsClick refer to individual works registered for copyright as “titles.” Thus, a group of 8 unpublished short stories comprises 8 titles. The names you give to works are the titles under which they will be registered. With group registration, it is highly advisable to name the files used for deposit copies the same as the titles of the works.
Copyright law and administration refers to specific work types (e.g., photographs) within broad categories (e.g. works of the visual arts). Many of these are intuitive, some less so. When using RightsClick, you generally do not need to know which works are in which categories, but the Copyright Office provides broad guidance you may find useful:
Preparing Files
For creators with large portfolios (e.g., photographers) we recommend files of 3mb or less. But for registration purposes, it is important that all the elements of a visual work are visible in the copy, so some highly detailed images may require large file sizes. For visual works, we recommend JPEG, but group photographs must be JPEG, TIFF, or GIF, and all deposit copies in any group must be the same file type. See list of allowed file types by the USCO.
For convenience and cost saving on processing fees, group registration options allow two or more works to be registered with one application. The rules vary depending on the type of work, and we provide more details on the work-specific pages below.
Copies of works submitted to the Copyright Office for registration are referred to as Deposit Copies. In most cases, these will be digital files. By default, in RightsClick, the name of your files will be the name of your Titles.
We urge everyone to use short, simple names for all files. Fewer than 20 characters is great; fewer than 40 characters is a good idea; and anything approaching 60 or more characters is likely chaos! A nice, clean format is Edison_May2022_001. There are a few hard rules about names, and these are:
- Latin letters and numbers only.
- No punctuation other than underscores. (e.g., ampersands are death!)
- Each Title in a group must have its own name.
For works first published in physical form before registration, you may be required to submit physical copies. Learn more here:
Sculpture, Jewelry, Paintings, Etc.
Of course, it would be impractical (and expensive!) to send a sculpture, painting, jewelry, or other works of applied arts to the Copyright Office as deposit copies. Fortunately, you don’t need to do that. You may register these types of works by sending photographs of them — but it may be advisable to submit more than one photo of the same work (e.g., showing all sides of a sculpture) to ensure that the registration encompasses the entire work.
Photographers!
Registration of groups of photographs is a unique process for several reasons.
Terms/Concepts
Joint Authors
When two or more people create a work, the work is “jointly authored,” and the names of all authors should be submitted with the copyright registration. As a matter of copyright registration, you are not asked to enter information about allocation of ownership among among joint authors.
Limit of Claim
The Copyright Office asks you to disclaim any work submitted with a deposit copy that you did not create. For instance, a nonfiction book often contains photos the author did not make. Thus, the book registration limits the claim by telling the Office that those photos are not claimed by the writer. Limit of Claim is a simple checkbox screen. You do not need to prepare complex descriptions.
Publication
For registration, the Copyright Office asks whether the work(s) being submitted are published or unpublished. This presents two questions for many customers. The first is understanding the legal meaning of “published,” and the second (sometimes) is trying to remember when that work was first published, which is the date the Copyright Office wants to know.
While the meaning of “published” is a long and complicated tale, what we tell customers is that publication typically involves offering to distribute copies of the work to the general public, whether for money or not. The question of “publication” may involve the volume or reach to a general versus a limited audience, and if you are unsure, you should seek legal counsel. Typically, display of a work (e.g., on a website or in a gallery) is not considered publication. See the Glossary entry.
The good news: thanks to a ruling by the Supreme Court, as long as you make a good-faith effort to get the right answer, the registration will remain valid even if it turns out you guessed wrong.
As for remembering when a work was published, do your best.
Timely registration is a prerequisite to filing a claim in court!
If an infringer knows you can’t go to court, settling a claim is far less likely.
Other General Info
Pro Tip!
Build the filing fees into your budget. One resolved infringement case can pay for a lifetime of registrations–and then some!
Registration Fees
| Registration Type | USCO | RightsClick | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| One Work by One Author (no limit of claim) | $45 | $15 | $60 |
| One Work by One Author (w/limit of claim) | $65 | $15 | $80 |
| One Work Made for Hire | $65 | $15 | $80 |
| Group Photo Applications of <100 titles: | $55 | $15 | $70 |
| Group Photo Applications of ≥ 100: | $55 | $30 | $85 |
| Group of Unpublished Works (max 10 per application) | $85 | $15 | $100 |
| Work by More Than One Author | $65 | $15 | $80 |
Questions?
We’ll be happy to hear from you, but we cannot offer legal advice.