Copyright Registration

The importance of registering creative works with the U.S. Copyright Office cannot be overstated. Registration generally is a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit for copyright infringement, and copyright holders may only recover federally prescribed statutory damages and recovery of full costs, including attorney’s fees, if registration occurs within established time frames.

Those statutory damages range up to $150,000 USD for each work willfully infringed. An infringer faced with paying such statutory penalties in addition to the copyright holder’s (and the infringer’s own) attorney’s fees and costs provide owners of timely filed copyright registrations with a tremendous advantage in enforcing their exclusive rights.

Our firm is one of the most established and well-respected license compliance firms in the United States. We handle a substantial amount of counseling, registration, licensing, protection, and enforcement of copyrights, including for many of the largest software companies in the world, either directly with custom designed programs, or by representing trade groups to which they belong. Leveraging properly filed copyright registrations, most of which our firm has handled for our clients, Donahue Fitzgerald LLP has pursued over 14,000 copyright infringement matters and recovered over $210 million dollars for our clients. To the best of our knowledge, we have handled more software license compliance matters than any firm in the world.