Copyright registration prep for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — copyright registration prep is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside trademarks & ip more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for copyright registration prep — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Copyright registration prep sits inside trademarks & ip, alongside Trademark search & registration, Trademark office action response, Trademark renewal (§8 & §9). Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

No — copyright attaches automatically the moment an original work is fixed in a tangible form, with no filing required for the right to exist. What registration adds is the ability to actually sue for infringement in the US (17 U.S.C. §411(a) generally requires registration first for a US work) and eligibility for statutory damages and attorney's fees if registered promptly.

Standard online registration is $65 per claim as of this writing. The Copyright Office submitted an updated schedule to Congress on July 14, 2026 proposing $65 to $85; under the statutory 120-day Congressional review process, that change becomes effective automatically absent Congressional action, landing at roughly mid-November 2026. It is not in effect yet — we confirm the live figure before any filing.

Unlike trademarks and patents, US copyright registration does not require a US-licensed attorney for foreign applicants — the Copyright Office allows a non-attorney to file on the owner's behalf as an authorized agent. CapEasy files directly as that agent; the claimant on the certificate is you.

It depends on the work category — literary work, visual art, sound recording, software, and the rest each have their own deposit requirement set by Copyright Office regulation. We confirm the current rule for your work's category against the Office's own guidance and assemble the deposit to it before filing, rather than submitting a generic upload.

Standard-track processing has historically run from several months to over a year depending on the Office's backlog and the claim type. The registration's effective date is the filing date, not the date the certificate is issued, so the delay doesn't cost you the priority date.

Yes — special handling, at $800 per claim on top of the base fee, compresses examination to roughly five business days. It's only granted for a documented urgent reason: pending or imminent litigation, a US Customs recordation deadline, or a comparable qualifying need, not general impatience about timing.

The examiner issues a refusal letter stating the grounds — commonly a lack of originality, a functional/utilitarian exclusion, or insufficient authorship evidence. There is a formal First Request for Reconsideration and, if that fails, a Second Request reviewed by the Copyright Office Review Board, each with its own fee and filing window. That reconsideration process is a separate service; we can organise the First Request narrative from your facts.

US registration is a US filing and a US litigation prerequisite — it doesn't itself create rights enforceable in other countries. Most countries where the US has copyright treaty relationships (the Berne Convention covers the great majority) recognise the underlying copyright on fixation without their own registration requirement, but US registration specifically is what unlocks a US lawsuit and US statutory damages.

Yes. The claimant is whoever owns the copyright — the individual author, or the employer/commissioning party if the work qualifies as work-made-for-hire or was assigned in writing. We record whichever the facts actually support based on the documentation you provide, rather than defaulting to one or the other.

Registration covers the work as deposited at the time of filing. A materially revised version with substantial new authorship is generally registered as a new claim covering the new material, rather than assumed to be automatically covered by an earlier registration of an older version — we flag this at intake if the work has gone through major revisions since it was first fixed.

The filed application, the assembled deposit copy, the Office's filing receipt and case number at submission, and — once examination completes — either the Certificate of Registration or the query/refusal letter organised for your instruction on next steps. The claimant of record throughout is you, not CapEasy.