Electronic Copyright Registration for Photographers

Electronic Copyright Registration for Photographers

Each time you take a photo, that image is copyrighted. Assuming that you can prove that you took a specific photo, then misuse of that photo could lead to monetary compensation. But the truth is that most intellectual property lawyers won’t touch your case unless the image has been registered with the US Copyright Office. A copyright protects forms of “authorship” (as opposed to trademarks and patents which protect marks and inventions), and registration confers significant legal benefits to the photographer, namely that you can claim statutory damages of up to $150,000 per image infringed.

A non-registered image isn’t eligible for statutory damages, however, the infringed party can seek actual damages and “disgorged” profits (which in some cases can exceed the statutory limit). The amount of compensation can vary in size, and based on a judge’s interpretation of “willfulness” of the infringer.

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For example, if a nefarious publisher uses your unregistered image of a grizzly bear in a magazine, you might be able to claim a few hundred dollars (i.e. not enough to pay the lawyer). But if the image is registered, you could get up to $150,000 in statutory damages.

Nuances of “Infringement”
Statutory infringements are assessed on a per image basis, with a single award available even if there are multiple infringements. If the nefarious publisher uses the grizzly bear image in a brochure and an ad, you’re only eligible for $150k in statutory damages, not $300k.

Additionally, if the nefarious publisher grabbed your images from a single magazine, or single website, there is also only one statutory damage available. The essay of grizzly bears ripped from your website and used in an ad is still only eligible for $150k.

Registration has a huge benefit, so make sure you register your images regularly.

There are numerous resources on how to register images manually, so we’ll focus on electronic copyright registration.

Electronic Registration
In 2008, the US Copyright Office began accepting electronic registration of images through their eCO system (Electronic Copyright Office). Prior to that, a photographer had to burn a CD or DVD of work, fill out a form, and mail in the application with a check. Electronic registration has several key benefits over manual registration:

–    Lower filing fee of $35 (per case, which may include multiple images)
–    Faster processing times
–    Online status tracking
–    Online payment
–    Online upload of images

Create an Account
Fill out your name and login information.

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Fill out your address information. Remember, some of this information will be in the public domain, so if you have privacy concerns, you might want to use a P.O. Box.

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Agreeing to the US Copyright Offices terms is done by clicking “Next”.

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You are automatically logged in and forwarded to the homepage.

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Navigating the System
Navigating eCO isn’t particularly intuitive, nor is the system very bulletproof (i.e. I’ve encountered a lot of errors from which I could not recover). Here are a few hints:
  • Make sure you hit “Save for Later” whenever you can to avoid unnecessary data loss. Unfortunately, when you click “Save for Later,” you’re always redirected to the homepage.
  • From the homepage, any incomplete applications are referred to as “Working Cases”
  • Click on the claim # to continue editing
  • Here’s where it gets weird. When you click on the case #, you are taken to the summary page for the case. The only way to navigate to the different pages of the case, is by clicking the “back” button in the page (not the browser back button). There is a table on the right of the screen that shows you where you are, but it’s not clickable.

Registration is a multi-part process:
1) Fill out information about your images and upload your images.
2) Add that “case” to your shopping cart (because each “case” has a separate registration fee).
3) Checkout/final submission.

Published or Not?
Before you start the process, you need to separate out images that have been published vs. unpublished. Even though you can submit lots of different content, you cannot mix published and unpublished content, so make sure you have organized your work accordingly.

What is Published?
Books and magazines are obvious forms of publication. The copyright office is a bit more vague as to whether putting an image on a website constitutes publication.  Specifically, they indicate:

“However, ‘publication’ may include the public distribution of copies by means of electronic transmission (e.g. over the internet). The applicant, who knows the facts surrounding distribution of copies of a work, must determine whether the work has been published or not”

PART 1:
Filing a Claim
Click the “Register a new claim” link on the right navigation. Note that the US Copyright Office uses “claim” and “case” interchangeably during this process. There are three main parts of electronic registration, and the system will take you through them serially.

Click “Start Registration” to begin.

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Select the type of registration. For photos, select “Work of the Visual Arts”.

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Your images need to be aggregated – whether logically or arbitrarily. We do this by creating a Title of the work. Click the “New” button to proceed.

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In most cases, you will select “Title of work being registered” when you have related images. The title of this work can be anything description. For example:

–    President Obama’s Inauguration
–    John and Nancy’s Wedding Reception
–    Dance Images from July 2008

You could also have more arbitrary groupings:

– My Work 1999 – 2009
– Ziggy Zaggy xlkdj!

Click “Save” when you’ve entered the information.

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There’s no limit to the number of images that you can register at one time, and since the registration fee is per submission, it makes sense to add as many unregistered images as possible. You can continue to add Titles as needed.

You should have predetermined whether the works you are registered have been published or not. Select the appropriate option. Non-published works only require a year of completion.

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Published works additionally require a date of publication and nation of first publication. Published works have to be grouped per publication per claim (aka “unit of publication”) because there is no way to affix multiple dates of publication to the form — i.e. only images from a single publication on a single date can be included. If your images don’t fall into this category, you have to either 1) submit then electronically under different claims (and therefore incur more fees), or 2) use the paper form VA. You cannot mix unpublished outtakes with your published images.

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The Author is most likely you, so click the “Add Me” link, and fill out the form. Even if you have a business name, you still might not want the “organization” to hold the copyright. “Domicile” is your country of residence.

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The Claimant is you, unless you have transferred your copyright. So click “Add Me” once again.

eco15-claimant.jpgUnless you are an “visual artist,” you probably have not based your photos on previous works. So 99% of the time, you’ll skip this section by clicking “Next.” However, if you are creating composite images that use multiple source images (particularly those not shot by you), then this section is of importance.

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Rights & Permissions Contact gives you a way to affix public contact information to the images. So if someone finds your image through the Copyright office, they will also be able to see this optional contact information.

The Correspondent information is who the Copyright Office will communicate with if questions arise. In most cases, that’s probably you, so click “Add Me”.

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Mail Certificate is where your registration will be mailed. In most cases, that’s probably you, so click “Add Me.”

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Unless you’re in litigation or engaging in litigation, leave the “Special Handling” blank and click “Next.” (Also note that there is an additional $685 fee for special handling.)

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Fill out the Certification page, and check “Upload electronic file.” The uploading of files is done after you pay for the registration. Any claim that hasn’t been submitted yet has the status of “working.”

PART 2:
Adding the Claim to your Cart and Payment
Review your submission to check for any errors. When you are satisfied with the contents, click the “Add to Cart” link.

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After you’ve added the claim to your cart, you can review it once more before proceeding to the payment by clicking “Checkout”

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Select your payment of Credit Card/ACH or Deposit Acct.

Payment is transacted on pay.gov, which is run by the US Treasury. A warning screen indicates that you are leaving the eCO site.
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If you’re paying via ACH, fill out the top box. If you’re using a credit card, fill out the bottom box. This non-intuitive layout is courtesy of the US Government.

eco23-payment-authorize.jpgIf the transaction is successful, you’ll be redirected back to the eCO site. Click “Next” to upload your images.

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PART 3:
Uploading Files
Usually, you’ll be registering multiple images at once. In this case, I suggest creating a zip file of images. The Copyright Office doesn’t give any specifics on the size of an image, but clearly, it has to hold enough detail to be identifiable. I’ve settled on a 300 pixel wide image, which I create using the “Image Processor” function in Photoshop.

Because you might be submitting multiple titles, it makes sense to name the zip files similarly to your titles. File names don’t really matter, although, it makes sense to adopt a logical naming structure in case your images get scrambled somewhere along the way. You definitely should embed meta data into the image (copyright and contact information).

The upload mechanism will time out after 30 minutes, so depending on the speed of your connection, you’ll have to figure out what size ZIP file you can upload without running into problems. Once you’ve completed the upload, you’ll receive a confirmation notice.

Many high volume shooters mail a DVD or CD because they’ve encountered issues with the timeout even when they have small thumbnails. Note that the registration date is not when you submit the form, but when the Copyright Office receives your images.

Click the “Upload Deposit” link on the appropriate Case# line to submit your images. DO NOT click “DONE” until you’ve uploaded your images!

Select a file(s) from your computer by clicking the browse button. The Item Title should correspond to the work’s title that you entered during the initial process. Click “submit files to copyright office”eco25-upload.jpg
A progress window will give you a status of the upload.

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You will see a success message upon completion. Click “Close Window.”

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When we tried it, we didn’t see the attachments appear in the section below. But since we had a confirmation number, we assumed everything was ok. Click “Done” to finish up the claim. You are redirected to the homepage.

The case is listed as “open” once you have submitted it, but while it’s awaiting a response from the Copyright Office.

You will receive two e-mails:

  • an Acknowledgement of Receipt from the US Copyright Office
  • a payment confirmation from Pay.Gov

You can always check on the status of the registration by logging back into eCO.

How long does it take?
From start to finish, it took about an hour to complete the process of:

– Creating an account
– Familiarizing myself with the screens
– Creating a case and adding the information
– Resizing and zipping up the images
– Submitting payment
– Uploading the images

For multiple “titles” under a single case, I suspect the bulk of the time will be in organizing, resizing and uploading the images. The main impediment to working faster in the eCO site is really the usability and interface design.

Notification
On July 8, 2009, less than two months after the images were submitted, I received a notification from the Copyright Office of the successful registration.

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FAQ
Do images that are delivered to a client constitute “publication”?
Not necessarily. The Copyright Act states that delivery to a “group of persons” can be publication, but most experts think delivery of files to a company would generally fail the litmus test for publication.

Are there consequences for mis-registering an image as published or unpublished?
If in doubt, register the image as published. The Copyright office allows you to amend the registration from published to unpublished, but not the other way around. There is also no need (nor should you) re-register an image when it moves from unpublished to published. The risk is that you lose an infringement on a technicality, which we don’t want to happen.

I heard that I can group different publications together in the same registration. But you said no. What’s up?
The paper form allows you to register multiple publications, but the eCO system does not.

I put images up on my personal website. Does that constitute publication?
Absolutely. You must register these images as “published.”

APPENDIX:

I’d like to extend a huge thanks to Jeff Sedlik of the PLUS Coalition for correcting a number of factual issues regarding copyright law and the registration process. Jeff has worked directly with the US Copyright Office for several years to elucidate and improve the registration process for photographers.

This information is for educational purposes only, and does not constitute legal advice.

 

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This article was written by

Allen Murabayashi is the co-founder of PhotoShelter.

There are 19 comments for this article
  1. Patrick Cunningham at 10:18 pm

    Thank you for this useful guide. But why should we, in the rest of the world, be forced to register with a US agency and pay money to do so, in order to establish rights which are ours with no requirement to register under the laws of our own countries, and under the regulations laid down in the Berne Convention on Copyright? I deeply resent the arrogance of the US government in using this US-based registration system to undermine the Berne Convention, thereby reneging on the undertakings it has made as a signatory. Patrick Cunningham

  2. Geoff Johnson at 6:22 pm

    Yeah, but the e-file system is unusable for most pros. We shoot 100Gb per month and even registering a small low res version causes the system crash. They should have had Photoshelter build it for them! There’s a great article on Selling Stock that sums this up, plus the fact that the Copyright office has backlogs of registrations. From selling stock- “The Copyright Office receives about 10,000 applications a week, 45% of which are in hard copy. The staff of 115 registration specialists can process about 7,000 a week, leaving 3,000 a week to be added to the growing pile of about 523,000 untouched applications. Workers are now handling paper applications that were received in 2007”. BTW the paper fees are going to be $65 starting in August.

  3. Chris Farley at 6:37 pm

    In the first paragraph, you mentioned that trademarks cover inventions. I believe you meant to say patents. Trademarks cover meaningful identifiers (logos, etc.) of companies. I imagine it was just a typo.

  4. Jeff Sed!ik at 2:16 am

    @Patrick, I don’t necessarily support the system of copyright registration here in the US, but you should note that copyright ownership in the US is completely automatic and does not require registration of any kind. As soon as an image is captured it is “copyrighted.” and no action is required on the part of the creator to own or protect that copyright. In the US, copyright registration is optional and provides supplemental remedies, exceeding the remedies available to rights holders in many countries, perhaps including yours. Registration is only required in the US if and when a rights holder decides to file a lawsuit against an infringer. Without registration, rights holders are protected from the creation of unauthorized reproductions, displays and derivatives, as well as the unauthorized distribution and performance of their work, until 70 years after their death, when the work becomes public domain. The exceptions would be “fair use” and, perhaps in the near future, the use of orphaned works, the latter of which will also likely be allowed in the EU and other regions. Without registration in advance of an infringement, a rights holder is entitled to seek damages including a fee for the unauthorized usage, compensation for any harm done to the rights holder’s ability to receive revenues from third parties for the usage of the work, and importantly, all of the profits of the infringer attributable to the use of the work. With a timely optional registration, the rights holder receives several bonus benefits, the most significant of which are (1) the option to elect to seek statutory damages (damages defined in the statutes), and (2) the option to seek reimbursement of attorneys fees and costs. Many rights holders with timely registrations forfeit their right to seek statutory damages, instead seeking actual damages and disgorged profits, which can be considerable and can exceed statutory damages, and are available even without an advance registration. In the US, registration is used to entice creators to submit their works to the library of congress (the copyright office is a department of the library of congress), so that the library can have access to those works and can fulfill its mandate to create an archive of works. The library reviews works submitted for copyright registration and may at its discretion include those works in the library’s archive. Note that the above is a very abbreviated explanation and is not intended to describe every nuance of copyright ownership and registration. My primary point is that copyright ownership in the US is automatic, and that registration in the US is an option, not a requirement. However, the benefits of registration are significant enough to warrant frequent and early registration by all photographers. About the current electronic registration system, this is the first year of operation of that system, and users can expect to see significant expanded capabilities and functionality over the next 2 years. Thanks to Alan and to Photoshelter for your informative post on this important subject.

  5. JuanOhJuan at 12:03 pm

    Thank you so much for taking the time to post this very useful information, with screen shots of the forms and everything. Very thorough work, generously explained and detailed… well done, and thanx again!

  6. Craig M at 7:10 pm

    If you are person that has never registered your images it seems to me that having to separate published from non-published would make it almost impossible to do. That’s the big wall you hit and the reason people don’t do it. I mean your supposed to go through thousands of images and then figure out which images are published and the exact date they were first published? Nice if you have a year off to figure it all out. Never going to happen.

  7. Christine H at 3:13 am

    I am with Patrick Cunningham. Although I understand the additional benefit of registering, the American way of dealing with copyright holders from other countries prevents those from asserting claims. In Germany the copyright is similar to the American right apart from the registration process. An American website is using one of my pictures for commercial purposes without any agreement. This is copyright infringement according to American as well as to German law. But to achieve a legal claim against the infringer I am forced to file such a claim with an American court. Of course my photo is not registered. I’m happy to know the most important German laws – how can I be familiar with American regulations when it comes to copyright infringement by an American citizen? Even if I would go for a registration now to cover a lawyers costs, this would be neither prior to infringement nor within three months of my first publication of the photo. Being not able in terms of money to pay an American lawyer (who is much more expensive than a German one) and to take the risk of such a litigation, the American infringer can go on without any worries. Nonetheless, I’m thinking about registering my images – just to find out that registering multiple published images online is not possible! This really is a nightmare!

  8. openid.shawnkoppenhoefer.com at 10:15 am

    @CraigM, As long as we register 300x300pixel images BEFORE they ever leave our computers it should be easy… as those images are unpublished…. And, as far as I understand, putting them up on Flickr doesn’t constitute publishing either (you perhaps you can have even done that without muddying the waters). So I’ve just dumped 300x300px versions of the 6000 images from my LR catalogue of January1-August31 into a big folder and removed the 10 or so so I had put on my personal website. BUT YOU’RE RIGHT about the images from before 2011. 🙁 I’m going to have to spend long hours separating out the images that I’ve used on my various personal websites and those that I haven’t. 🙁 And I’m going to have to determine the EXACT DATE that I put those images on the website. 🙁 And since you can’t affix multiple dates of publication to the online-form, only the images from a single publication on a single date can be included… so it’s going to cost you $30 per separate image for those you put on your website, unless you want to do a paper (non-electronic) registration. Has anyone found a solution or answer from the CO on this? arghh.

  9. Dayna More at 11:12 am

    Thank you for this information. I’m sure it will save me a lot of time today as I begin the long process of registering my images.

  10. Pingback: Protecting Your Online Photos | Da-Ho-Tra
  11. Dominic Urbano at 11:08 am

    Thank you for the step by step. The eCO site is not intuitive… but given instructions such as this it is certainly not terribly complicated either. Copyright registration is the only way to make enforcement feasible. Just yesterday I was on the phone with a business owner who had stolen one of my images. She said, “If I wanted to I could just keep the image up because I know it will cost you more to try to take me to court than what you could win.” I politely informed her that that was a theory she might not be able to afford to test. She took the photo down. Remember, you are dealing with thieves… but unfortunately, unlike other stolen property, you can’t just call the police and have them handle it. You are left on your own to pursue your property and damages. With registration you put the full force of the law on your side. – Thank you for the copyright registration article. I will certainly be directing others to read it.

  12. Ajay at 6:29 pm

    Hi Allen,

    I want to know Is this copyright for one time only? For example If I clicked 100 awesome photos today and want them to be copyrighted so I will go to the website and register for copyright. Is the same copyright be valid for all other images that I am going to click later on. Can I upload the photos afterwards to get copyrighted again under the same amount i.e $35 or Do I have to pay again and again to get my all albums copyrighted.

    • shel at 1:47 am

      Ajay, it’s not obvious from your post that you understand copyright . . . all your photos are copyrighted the instant you take them. You do NOT have to register for copyright to exist.

  13. Philippe B. at 2:55 pm

    Hi Mr. Murabayashi,

    This is a great step by step tutoral for copyright registration with the US-copyright office.

    Unfortunatly, the US-CO is the only national copyright office offering a tool to register a “actual copy” of the photography you’re registrering. In all others Countries, the author only register the title of his/her creation and add a short description.

    What worth a copyright registration, even a official one, when you can’t rely it to the original work ? Sadly close to nothing.

    this is why we createad http://www.myrightskeeper.com (MRK)

    Our service provide a irrefutable proof of the time you create a photography, or any other type of work. This time-steamped evidence included a copy of your creation and its digital signature to ensure the integrity of your copyright protection.

    For a photographer who don’t live in US the best way to protect his/her intellectual property is by combining a certification from MRK with a registration from his/her national copyright office.

    hoping this could is helpful for all of you

    Philippe Bonin
    http://www.myrightskeeper.com

  14. Davide - Nomad Travellers at 1:48 am

    Hello, I’m trying to register online a group of published photos with the experimental online registration. Since it’s my first time, I was told to call the 202-707-8202 to speak with a VA specialist and to activate the (non-standard) online registration procedure.
    I’ve called already 5 times and every time there is a registered disc saying to leave my contact data to be called back.
    Over 3 weeks passed since the first time I phoned and nobody called me back.
    Is this normal? Should I wait longer or insist on calling and first or later some humans will answer?
    If you know, what’s a standard waiting time to be called back?
    Thank you and have a nice day

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