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Authors Alliance submitted comments in response to the United States Copyright Office’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for Copyright Office Fees. The Office has proposed a new fee schedule for its services, including increasing fees for several services related to registering and recording copyrights. Because of the benefits associated with registration and recordation, our comment urges the Office to consider adopting a differentiated fee schedule that accommodates all authors—including authors with works of unproven or low commercial value.

As the Office acknowledges, “when fees are set too high, potential users—including non-profit or non-commercial users—will be unable or unwilling to pay and simply will stop participating at all and the public record will suffer.” There is strong precedent for differentiated fees in other areas of intellectual property, namely patents and trademarks. At minimum, we suggest that the Office consider ways to differentiate fees for recording terminations of transfers and to further differentiate fees for registration.

Differentiated fees would help to alleviate the financial burden on individual authors, maximize participation in the registration system, and provide the public with information about the largest possible number of works. Differentiated fees would also make it easier for authors who want to get their rights back to dedicate a work to the public to exercise their termination of transfer rights.

Further details can be found in the full text of our comment. Hover over the document below to view the comment in your browser, or download here.