Submitting your copyright registration application
The final steps: making payment and uploading your work
If you’ve been following along, you’ve completed the first step to submitting your copyright registration application: filling out the form. Today we’ll tackle the final two steps. As a reminder, three things must come together for the U.S. Copyright Office to register your copyright:
Complete registration application (covered in Parts 1 and 2)
Make payment
Provide a ‘best edition’ deposit copy
Parts 1 and 2 covered how to complete your application. And I’m guessing you know how to pay online, so I won’t dwell on that.
It can be overwhelming to register your copyrights
Learn to confidently register your copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office…even if you have tried (and given up) before!
Get access to an in-depth course guiding you step-by-step and screen-by-screen through the process of registering your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office. You’ll go from not knowing what you are going to register to having a strategy for future registrations.
And if you get stuck, you’ll have our 24/7 online community to help you out!
However, where things can get a little tricky is when it comes to the deposit copy.
What is a ‘best edition’ deposit copy?
As part of your registration, you must submit to the Copyright Office a “best edition” of your work. The Copyright Office provides a resource outlining what is acceptable as a best edition for various types of works.
To help you out, the general rules are:
if your work is unpublished or only published electronically, then you can upload your work using the electronic system
if your work is published and there is a hard copy, then you must mail the U.S. Copyright Office two copies of your work
Tricks on the upload process
The U.S. Copyright Office eCO system will only accept specific file types. You can see the full list here of what they accept. For my own purposes (and on behalf of my clients) I submit:
JPG files for images
MP3 files for audio
MOV files for video
PDF files for text based works
The exception to the above rules is when I’m submitting lots of files on the same application. If that’s the case I batch together files into a no more than ~20 MB ZIP package and upload those.
If you are submitting image files, my general recommendations are to make the images:
between 500 and 900 px on the longest side
exported with a compression setting of 60-70 (or 6-7 depending on the program)
in sRGB color space
exported with the standard metadata embedded
without a watermark
If you ever get stuck in this process, the folks at the Copyright Office are also helpful and have provided tons of resources to help you.
One resource in particular, I want to highlight is the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices published last year that gives you an overview of the registration process. It also explains what is and isn’t copyrightable in detail for various kinds of works and exactly how to fill out your application. It’s a super helpful resource, albeit heavy on the legalese.
You now have the tools you need to complete and submit a copyright registration application!
It can be overwhelming to register your copyrights
Learn to confidently register your copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office…even if you have tried (and given up) before!
Get access to an in-depth course guiding you step-by-step and screen-by-screen through the process of registering your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office. You’ll go from not knowing what you are going to register to having a strategy for future registrations.
And if you get stuck, you’ll have our 24/7 online community to help you out!
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