Creative works of expression are likely your most valuable assets if you are a film studio, photographer, software developer, writer, musician, or visual artist. To fully protect against copycats, you need federal copyright registration.

Copyright law protects creative works of expression such as music, the written word, photographs, and paintings, but it also protects creations such as software code, engineering designs, architectural plans, and more. Copyright protections include the exclusive rights to reproduction, distribution, public performance, and the right to create derivative works.

Why should I register a copyright?

Although copyright protection technically exists as soon as a creative work has been created, securing a federal registration with the U.S. Copyright Office has a number of advantages. Without a federal copyright registration, it is more difficult to enforce your rights or to stop acts of infringement. A federal registration also avoids disputes about authorship by providing evidence of the date of creation. 

To obtain the maximum benefits of U.S. copyright laws, and before you can file a lawsuit, you must file a copyright application before publication (before you make the work available to the public) or, in some cases, within five years of publication. If you file within this time frame, the registration creates a legal presumption that you own the copyright and that your copyright is valid. That means the opposing party will have to prove that you do not own the copyright. That will be a difficult burden for them to meet.

How does copyright registration affect my recovery of damages?

If you are a copyright owner and you succeed in a lawsuit, you will be entitled to recover actual damages: whatever you lost because of the infringement of your copyright. This can be a hard number to calculate.

However, if you are the owner of a registered copyright, you can choose to receive statutory damages instead of actual damages. Courts can award between $750 and $30,000 for each infringement of a copyrighted work. If the infringement was willful, meaning the defendant deliberately used your work despite knowing it was copyrighted, you can recover up to $150,000. The right choice of which type of damages to pursue will depend on whether and when you registered your copyright and how easy it is to calculate your damages.

Keep in mind that if you registered your copyright before the infringement, you will also be eligible to recover attorneys’ fees and litigation costs from the infringer.

For the strongest legal protection, you need to register your creative work with the U.S. Copyright Office. A federal registration is an extremely important step in stopping infringement, maintaining control of a work, and avoiding costly legal disputes. If it seems like an unnecessary expense, consider that a legal dispute in the future will be far more costly and time-consuming than any fees you’ll pay for a federal copyright registration.

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