How to Register a Copyright: eCO Filing, Fees, and Timing

To register a copyright, create an account on the U.S. Copyright Office’s Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) system, fill out an application for your work, upload a digital copy, and pay a filing fee that starts at $45. Copyright itself exists the moment you fix an original work in tangible form, but registration is what unlocks the ability to sue in federal court and to recover the larger damages the statute makes available.¹²

Why Timing Matters Before You File

You cannot bring a copyright infringement lawsuit over a U.S. work in federal court until the Copyright Office has either registered the work or refused the application.² So registration is the door to enforcement. But the bigger reason to register early is money.

If you register before any infringement begins, or within three months of first publishing the work, you qualify for statutory damages and attorney’s fees.³ Miss that window and you can still sue, but you’re limited to actual losses and the infringer’s profits, both of which are expensive to prove and often smaller than what statutory damages would deliver.

Statutory damages run from $750 to $30,000 per infringed work, and a court can push that up to $150,000 if the infringement was willful. If the infringer proves they had no reason to know they were infringing, the court may reduce the award to as low as $200.⁴ Courts may also award reasonable attorney’s fees to the winning party.⁵

One more benefit: a registration certificate issued within five years of first publication counts as prima facie evidence that your copyright is valid. The other side has to disprove it rather than you having to prove it. Later registrations still carry weight, but the court decides how much.²

What You Can Register

Copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium. The work has to be independently created with at least a minimal spark of creativity, and it has to exist in some physical or digital form. Eight categories qualify:

Literary works, including books, articles, blog posts, and computer programs
Musical works, including any lyrics
Dramatic works such as plays, screenplays, and scripts
Pantomimes and choreographic works
Pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, including photographs, illustrations, and maps
Motion pictures and other audiovisual works
Sound recordings, which are separate from the underlying composition
Architectural works

Copyright does not cover ideas, facts, procedures, systems, or methods of operation. It protects the expression, not the underlying concept. Titles, names, short phrases, slogans, and simple listings of ingredients are also outside its reach.⁶ And mailing yourself a copy of your work does nothing legally. There is no “poor man’s copyright” in U.S. law.

Information and Files to Gather First

Incomplete or inconsistent applications are the leading cause of delay. The Copyright Office reports having to contact applicants on 27% of all claims to resolve problems before it can decide.⁷ Have this ready before you sit down at eCO:

The title of the work
Each author’s name, country of citizenship, and year of birth
The copyright claimant, meaning the person or entity that owns the copyright (which may be the author, an employer, or someone who received the rights in writing)
The year of creation
If published, the date and country of first publication
A short description of what the author contributed (for example, “text,” “photograph,” “musical composition and lyrics”)
A digital deposit copy of the work in an acceptable format

If you made the work as an employee doing your regular job, your employer owns it as a work made for hire. The same rule can apply to commissioned work, but only when four conditions all hold: the work falls into one of nine specific categories (such as contributions to a collective work, translations, or parts of a motion picture), there is a written agreement, that agreement explicitly calls the work a work made for hire, and every party has signed.⁸ Freelancers whose contracts don’t meet all four remain the copyright owner.

If you have several unpublished works to register at once, you can bundle up to ten of them in a single application under the Group Registration of Unpublished Works option. All works must be by the same author, in the same general category, and each needs its own title and its own uploaded file.⁹

Filing Through eCO Step by Step

The Electronic Copyright Office system handles almost all registrations.¹⁰ The path runs as follows.

Create an account at the eCO Registration System portal.¹¹ Log in and select the application type that matches your work. For most individuals registering a single work, the standard application is the right choice.

Enter the author, claimant, title, and publication information you gathered. Then upload the deposit file. The system accepts a wide range of formats, including PDF, JPEG, MP3, WAV, MOV, and DOCX, with a maximum file size of 500 MB per file.¹² Uploading an unacceptable file type stalls your effective date of registration until the Office receives a usable replacement.

Review every field carefully. Certifying the application is a legal declaration that the information is correct. Then pay the filing fee.

Filing Fees

$45 for a single work with one author who is also the claimant and where the work is not made for hire
$65 for the standard electronic application, which covers multiple authors, a different claimant, or a work made for hire
$125 for a paper filing using Forms PA, SR, TX, VA, or SE

The $45 rate is a real discount, and most individual creators registering their own work qualify.¹³

When Your Registration Takes Effect and How Long It Takes

The effective date of your registration is the day the Copyright Office receives all three required pieces together: a complete application, an acceptable deposit, and the correct fee. Processing time doesn’t change that date. It reaches back to when the Office had everything in hand.² That matters because the three-month window for statutory damages runs from your publication date, not from when your certificate arrives.

Based on cases closed between April and September 2025, average processing across all claims runs about 2.5 months. Online applications that go through without any issues average 1.9 months. If the Office has to contact you to fix something, that stretches to roughly 3.7 months. Paper filings run longer: 4.2 months without issues and 6.7 months when correspondence is needed.⁷

Special Handling for Rush Situations

If you need the registration fast, you can request special handling for $800 per claim. The Copyright Office grants it only for three reasons: pending or prospective litigation, a customs matter, or a contract deadline.¹⁴¹³

Fixing Mistakes After You File

If you spot an error in a registration, a misspelled name, a wrong publication date, or missing author information, you can file a supplementary registration to correct or amplify the record. Electronic filing costs $100; paper Form CA costs $150.¹³ A supplementary registration doesn’t replace the original. It sits alongside it in the public catalog, linked to the first record.

Two Things Registration Doesn’t Handle

AI-Generated Material

Copyright requires human authorship. The Copyright Office will refuse to register a work produced entirely by artificial intelligence without creative input from a human. Works that use AI as a tool can still be registered when a human exercised meaningful creative control over the final result. If your work includes AI-generated material, keep records of your prompts, your edits, and how you shaped the output, and disclose the AI elements in your application. Failing to disclose can jeopardize the registration.

Mandatory Deposit With the Library of Congress

Separate from the deposit copy you upload with your registration, federal law requires the copyright owner of any work published in the United States to send two copies of the “best edition” to the Library of Congress within three months of publication. That obligation applies whether you register or not, and whether the work carries a copyright notice or not.¹⁵ Filing for registration and including your deposit copies can often satisfy both requirements at once. Works first published abroad but distributed in the United States require one copy instead of two. Hardship exemptions exist but require a written request.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Title 17 USC 408 – Copyright Registration in General
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Title 17 USC 410 – Registration of Claim and Issuance of Certificate
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Title 17 USC 412 – Registration as Prerequisite to Certain Remedies for Infringement
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Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Title 17 USC 504 – Remedies for Infringement: Damages and Profits
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Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Title 17 USC 505 – Remedies for Infringement: Costs and Attorneys Fees
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U.S. Copyright Office. Registering a Work
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U.S. Copyright Office. Registration Processing Times FAQs
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U.S. Copyright Office. Works Made for Hire – Circular 30
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U.S. Copyright Office. Group Registration of Unpublished Works
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U.S. Copyright Office. Register Your Work
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U.S. Copyright Office. eCO Registration System
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U.S. Copyright Office. eCO Acceptable File Types
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U.S. Copyright Office. Fees
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U.S. Copyright Office. Special Handling – Circular 10
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U.S. Copyright Office. Mandatory Deposit