Make your voice heard regarding the upcoming increases to copyright registration fees!
Edit the letter below by including your personal story about how you use the copyright registration system and how the upcoming registration fee increases will affect your ability to register your copyrights.
Once you edit the letter, click the “Generate Letter” button, and then copy & paste the letter in your own email to send to the Copyright Office at meft@copyright.gov.
The Letter:
[DATE]
Dear Register Perlmutter,
I am an individual [photographer/illustrator/visual artist] writing to ask you to reconsider the U.S. Copyright Office’s proposed increases in copyright registration fees.
Copyright registration is critically important to creators like me. While copyright exists from the moment a work is created, registration is essential to our ability to effectively protect and enforce our rights when our work is infringed.
However, for photographers, illustrators, and other visual artists, registration presents a particular challenge because we often create hundreds or thousands of new works each year. Registration fees are therefore not an occasional expense; they can represent a significant and recurring cost of protecting our work.
The proposed fee increases would make that burden greater. For many individual creators, higher fees will mean making difficult decisions about which works we can afford to register. For others, it may mean registering substantially fewer works or stopping registration altogether.
[OPTIONAL — PLEASE PERSONALIZE: Add one or two sentences explaining your own experience. For example: how many works you create or register each year, approximately what you spend on registration, whether you have experienced infringement, or how higher fees would affect your registration decisions.]
I recognize that the U.S. Copyright Office has significant responsibilities and must have the resources necessary to operate an effective registration system. I also appreciate the work that the Office does to improve registration options and make the copyright system more accessible to creators. But affordability is itself an important part of accessibility.
But affordability is itself an important part of accessibility.
At a time when creative works can be copied, distributed, scraped, and used at unprecedented scale, this is not the time to make copyright registration less accessible to the individual creators that copyright is intended to protect.
I respectfully ask that you take another look at the impact the proposed fee increases will have on individual photographers, illustrators, visual artists, and other independent creators, and to reconsider the proposed increases before they take effect.
Thank you for your service to the creative community and for considering the perspective of individual creators who rely on the Copyright Office to help protect their livelihoods.
Sincerely,
[Name]
[Photographer/Illustrator/Visual Artist]
[City, State]