Register a published work within 3 months of first publication and you keep statutory damages and attorney's fees. Register on day 91, and for every infringement that already started, those remedies are gone. Permanently.
Section 412 of the Copyright Act ties two specific remedies to the timing of your registration: statutory damages and attorney's fees. For published works, you must register before the infringement starts, OR within 3 months of first publication. Either path keeps both remedies available.
Miss both windows, and the work is still copyrighted. You can still register later. You can still sue once you do. But the court can only award actual damages, and you pay your own legal bill regardless of who wins.
The 3-month rule is not a soft suggestion. The Copyright Act treats it as a bright-line cutoff. Two creators publish the same kind of work on the same day. One files on day 89, one on day 91. Both face the same infringement six months later.
Same lawsuit, same infringement, same court. The only variable is two days of paperwork.
Actual damages mean you have to document your loss. For a small creator, that often means proving lost sales of a specific number of copies, or trying to disgorge the infringer's profits. If a competitor copies your photo onto their site and gets 1,000 page views from it, the actual damages calculation may come out to a few hundred dollars, or zero, depending on what you can prove.
Statutory damages skip the proof problem entirely. The court picks a number between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work, raised to $150,000 for willful infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)). The plaintiff doesn't have to itemize a single lost sale.
The clock starts on first publication, which the Copyright Act defines as the distribution of copies to the public by sale, rental, lease, or lending. A book hits bookstores. An album hits Spotify. Photos go up on a stock site. A blog post is published to the open web.
Showing a work to a private circle, or sending review copies under contract, is not publication. Posting it publicly is. If you're not sure, assume the earlier date — the cost of being wrong runs one direction only.
For unpublished works, the rule is simpler and stricter. Statutory damages and attorney's fees are only available for infringement that begins after registration. There is no 3-month grace period for unpublished material. If your draft, demo, or prototype could be infringed before publication, register early.
The cleanest approach is to register before publication. The next-best is to set a reminder for around day 60 — that gives you a month to handle the application, dig up deposit copies, and confirm the right form. Setting it for day 89 is asking for trouble.
See the full copyright registration reminder page for context, or the step-by-step filing guide for the eCO process itself.
Set a reminder before the 3-month window closes.
Done in seconds. No sign-up required.
Under 17 U.S.C. § 412, a copyright owner must register a published work within 3 months of first publication to be eligible for statutory damages and attorney's fees. After 90 days, those remedies are forfeited for any infringement that began before the late registration.
The clock starts on the date of first publication — the first time copies of the work are distributed to the public by sale, rental, lease, or lending. For unpublished works, the rule is different: register before any infringement begins to keep statutory damages on the table.
Statutory damages are a per-work amount the court awards without you having to prove actual loss — $750 to $30,000 ordinarily, up to $150,000 for willful infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)). Actual damages are your provable lost profits or the infringer's profits, which can be small or impossible to document.
You can still register and you can still sue. But for any infringement that began before that registration, you're limited to actual damages and you cannot recover attorney's fees. The window does not reopen, even retroactively.
No. For unpublished works, registration must occur before the infringement begins to preserve statutory damages and attorney's fees. There is no 3-month grace period — the protection only exists prospectively.
No. 17 U.S.C. § 412 ties both statutory damages and attorney's fees to timely registration. Federal copyright cases routinely cost hundreds of thousands to litigate, so missing the window often means winning the lawsuit but losing money on legal costs.
Statutory damages and attorney's fees disappear at day 91. A reminder is the difference. Free, no account, takes 30 seconds.
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