Copyright Fundamentals Toolkit: Ownership, Registration, Duration, and Scope

By Casey Scott McKay · 2025-09-07

This toolkit is the orientation guide to American copyright at the starting line, and a curated tour of every Marksy document that carries part of the subject. It maps seven moving parts in sequence — what copyright covers under 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) and refuses to cover under § 102(b), the fixation requirement and its authorization gloss, the six exclusive rights of § 106 and the limitations that shrink them, who owns the work under § 201 and the two exclusive routes to work-made-for-hire status, what registration under §§ 408 through 412 actually buys and when it stops being available, how long the term runs under §§ 302 through 305 and how to do the public domain arithmetic on a 1938 book, and the two surviving formalities that still pay for themselves, copyright notice and copyright management information under § 1202. Each thematic section introduces the sub-topic in plain terms and then routes the reader to the Marksy articles, guides, and checklists that do the operational work, with a note on when in a matter to reach for each one. A branching reading path handles the four situations that bring people to this subject — a client who just discovered an infringement, a company papering its title before a financing, a creator filing for the first time, and a publisher clearing rights in old material. A table of controlling authorities, a duration cheat sheet, a note on the forms the corpus does and does not contain, and annotated pointers to the adjacent toolkits close it out.

IP and Technology > Copyright | Toolkit | Published 7 September 2025 - Updated 15 March 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

Summary. This toolkit is the orientation guide to American copyright at the starting line, and a curated tour of every Marksy document that carries part of the subject. It maps seven moving parts in sequence: what copyright covers under 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) and refuses to cover under § 102(b); the fixation requirement and the authorization gloss buried in its definition; the six exclusive rights of § 106 and the limitations that shrink them; who owns the work under § 201 and the two exclusive routes to work-made-for-hire status; what registration under §§ 408 through 412 actually buys and when it quietly stops being available; how long the term runs under §§ 302 through 305, with the public domain arithmetic worked on a 1938 book; and the two surviving formalities that still pay for themselves, copyright notice and copyright management information under § 1202. Each thematic section introduces the sub-topic in plain terms and then routes you to the Marksy documents that do the operational work, with a note on when in a matter to reach for each. A branching reading path handles the four situations that actually bring people here, and a table of controlling authorities, a duration cheat sheet, and annotated pointers to the adjacent toolkits close it out.

Keywords: copyright fundamentals · 17 u.s.c. 102 · originality · feist v. rural telephone · fixation requirement · idea-expression divide · section 106 exclusive rights · work made for hire · section 201 ownership · copyright registration · section 412 statutory damages · copyright duration · section 302 term · public domain calculation · copyright renewal · copyright notice · section 1202 copyright management information · first sale doctrine · section 203 termination · star athletica separability

Start Here

Copyright is the only significant intellectual property right in the United States you acquire by accident. Write four sentences, shoot a photograph, commit a chord progression to a hard drive, and you own something enforceable in federal court against the entire world, without a filing, a fee, an examiner, or a lawyer. Trademark rights require use in commerce. Patents require an application and years of prosecution. Copyright requires only that you make something and that it stick to a surface.

That generosity is exactly why the subject goes wrong. A right that arrives free is a right nobody manages. The client who never thought about copyright because it "happens automatically" is the client who discovers, at the worst possible moment, that the contractor who built the site owns it, that the photographs were registered eight months too late to be worth suing over, and that the 1959 illustration everyone assumed was in the public domain was renewed in 1987 by an heir who is very much alive.

This toolkit is for the person who has to sort that out: the founder who just found her product photos on a competitor's storefront, the in-house lawyer building a registration program, the transactional associate running an IP schedule before a Series B, and the litigator screening a case for whether it can be brought at all.

It answers three questions.

Is there a copyright here, and what does it cover? Subject matter, originality, fixation, and the idea-expression divide decide whether the client owns anything, and they routinely decide that the answer is "less than you think."
Who owns it, and can they prove it? Authorship, work made for hire, joint authorship, and the § 204(a) writing requirement determine whose name goes on the complaint. Chain of title is where most portfolios fail.
What is the right actually worth, and for how long? Registration timing under 17 U.S.C. § 412 sets the ceiling on recovery, and duration under §§ 302 through 305 sets the end date. Both are pure arithmetic, and both are usually done far too late.

If you read only one thing, read What Copyright Registration Actually Buys You: Statutory Damages, Fees, and the Right to Sue. It is the single highest-leverage document in this subject, because it explains the one fact that decides whether a copyright is an asset or a decoration: the calendar. Section 411(a) keeps you out of court until the Copyright Office acts, and § 412 strips statutory damages and attorney's fees from any infringement that started before your effective date of registration. Two photographers with identical claims and a $148,000 difference in outcome, separated by nothing but a filing date. Read it before you read anything else here, then read Who Owns the Work second, because the two of them together cover about seventy percent of the mistakes practitioners actually make.

Copyright End to End: The System in One Pass

Seven moving parts, in the order they matter.

1. Subject matter. Section 102(a) protects "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression," and lists eight categories: literary works; musical works including any accompanying words; dramatic works including any accompanying music; pantomimes and choreographic works; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works. The list is illustrative rather than closed, and the categories are read broadly — software is registered as a literary work, a blueprint as a graphic work.

2. Originality. The constitutional floor is low but real. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991), requires independent creation plus "at least a modicum" of creativity, and it killed the sweat-of-the-brow theory that had let compilers claim ownership of effort. Facts are never original to anyone. A selection or arrangement of facts can be, but the resulting copyright is thin.

Consider Ostrom Analytics, a Minneapolis firm that spent about $900,000 assembling a database of 41,000 municipal water-utility rate schedules. Under Feist, the rates themselves are facts, free to anyone. Ostrom's copyright reaches its taxonomy, its comparison categories, and its editorial choices about which utilities to include — and a competitor who re-derives the same rates from the same public filings has taken nothing. This is the conversation that surprises clients most, and the earlier it happens the better.

3. What the statute affirmatively refuses. Section 102(b) excludes any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery," a codification of Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879). Two doctrinal children of that provision do most of the work in litigation: merger, which withholds protection where an idea can be expressed in only a few ways, and scènes à faire, which withholds protection from elements flowing inevitably from a setting or genre. Useful articles get their own rule — a design feature is protectable only if it can be perceived as art separate from the article and would qualify on its own. Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc., 580 U.S. 405, 417 (2017). And government edicts belong to nobody. Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255, 265-69 (2020); 17 U.S.C. § 105.

4. Fixation. A work is "fixed" when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or communicated for more than a transitory duration — by or under the authority of the author. § 101. That last clause does more work than practitioners expect. When Nell Adeyemi improvises a nine-minute solo at a Chicago festival and never notates or records it, an audience member's phone video does not fix her choreography, because the fixation was not authorized. The work is not copyrighted and never was; the anti-bootlegging provision at § 1101 would help her if she were a musician, but it reaches live musical performances only. At the other extreme, transient copies can be fixations: RAM copies counted in MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511, 518-19 (9th Cir. 1993), while buffer data held for 1.2 seconds did not in Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., 536 F.3d 121, 127-30 (2d Cir. 2008).

5. The rights. Section 106 grants six exclusive rights: reproduction; preparation of derivative works; distribution by sale, rental, lease, or lending; public performance; public display; and digital audio transmission of sound recordings. Section 106A adds attribution and integrity rights for a narrow class of works of visual art. Every one of them is qualified by §§ 107 through 122 — fair use, library and archive privileges, first sale, classroom and religious-service exemptions, the software provisions of § 117, and a family of compulsory licenses.

6. Ownership and duration. Copyright vests initially in the author, § 201(a), and paying for a work does not make the payer the author. The lone exception is work made for hire, which has exactly two routes and no third. Transfers require a signed writing under § 204(a); nonexclusive licenses do not. Recordation under § 205 governs priority. Termination under §§ 203 and 304(c) hands the author a right to take the grant back that no contract can waive. Duration runs life plus seventy for ordinary post-1977 works, with the 1909 Act still governing everything published before 1978.

7. Formalities. The United States abolished mandatory copyright notice on 1 March 1989, when the Berne Convention Implementation Act took effect, and abolished renewal as a condition for works published from 1964 forward. What remains is a set of optional formalities with real teeth. Registration is optional but functionally mandatory. Notice is optional but forecloses the innocent-infringement defense under §§ 401(d) and 402(d). Copyright management information is not required at all, but stripping someone else's is independently actionable under § 1202.

Jurisdiction is exclusively federal, 28 U.S.C. § 1338(a), with a venue rule broader than the general one, 28 U.S.C. § 1400(a). State-law claims equivalent to the § 106 rights in fixed works are preempted, § 301(a). The limitations period is three years, § 507(b), and the accrual question underneath it is unsettled — the Supreme Court assumed the discovery rule without deciding it in Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy, 601 U.S. 366, 371 (2024).

Part One — What Copyright Covers, and What It Refuses To

The threshold analysis is subtractive. Start with the work as delivered, then strip out facts, ideas, methods, functional constraints, stock elements, public domain material, and anything the client licensed rather than made. What survives is the protectable core, and it is frequently a fraction of what the client believes they own. Doing this at intake saves more money than any other habit in copyright practice.

Proving Copyright Infringement: Access, Substantial Similarity, and the Idea-Expression Divide is the deepest treatment in the corpus of where protection stops — Feist originality, § 102(b), merger and scènes à faire, and the three comparison frameworks courts use, including abstraction-filtration-comparison from Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992). Read it when you are deciding whether a case exists at all, and again before you write a demand letter, because a demand that overclaims the scope of the work invites a declaratory judgment action you did not want.
Who Owns What the Machine Made: Copyright Authorship in the Age of Generative AI is the modern edge of the subject-matter inquiry: the human authorship requirement, traced from Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884), to Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025), plus the Copyright Office's disclosure guidance and the selection-and-arrangement carve-out. Reach for it the first time a client says the words "we used Midjourney for the hero image," which for most practices is now weekly.
Trade Secrets and the DTSA: Protecting What You Cannot Register matters here because it covers the fallback. When § 102(b) or the human-authorship rule takes the asset outside copyright, secrecy is frequently the only regime left. Read it in the same sitting as any conversation about an algorithm, a data set, a pricing model, or a machine-generated deliverable.
The Legal Layers of a Website: IP, Contracts, Privacy, and the DMCA Before You Ship does the subtraction exercise on the single most common client asset. It separates source code, interface, copy, data, and brand across five bodies of law and explains why the most valuable layer is usually the unregistrable one. It is the right thing to hand a founder who asks whether "the website is copyrighted."
Two Copyrights, One Song: Music Licensing, Sampling, and the Clearance Maze is the best illustration in the corpus of why the category question is not academic. One recording carries two independent copyrights under § 102(a)(2) and § 102(a)(7), owned by different people and licensed through entirely different institutions. Read it before any matter touching audio, including a thirty-second social clip.

Trap. "We own the copyright in our data" is almost never true and is frequently repeated in warranties. Before you let a client represent it in a purchase agreement, run the Feist filter over what is actually being sold: the facts are not owned, the schema may be a method of operation under § 102(b), and what remains may be a thin selection-and-arrangement claim that will not support the indemnity attached to it.

Part Two — The Section 106 Bundle and the Limits That Shrink It

The six rights are best understood as six separate causes of action, not one. A defendant may infringe the reproduction right and not the distribution right, or the display right and nothing else. Pleading them accurately narrows discovery and prevents the embarrassment of a count that the facts do not support.

| Right | Section | What it reaches | The limitation that matters most | |---|---|---|---| | Reproduction | § 106(1) | Copies and phonorecords, including digital copies | Fair use, § 107; § 117 for software owners | | Derivative works | § 106(2) | Translations, adaptations, sequels, remixes | Fair use; the § 304(c)(6)(A) derivative works exception after termination | | Distribution | § 106(3) | Sale, rental, lease, lending | First sale, § 109(a); Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013), applies it to lawfully made foreign copies | | Public performance | § 106(4) | Literary, musical, dramatic, choreographic, audiovisual | §§ 110, 111, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122; the transmit clause after American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc., 573 U.S. 431 (2014) | | Public display | § 106(5) | Most work types, including single film frames | The Ninth Circuit's server test, Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146, 1159-60 (9th Cir. 2007) | | Digital audio transmission | § 106(6) | Sound recordings only | § 114's carve-outs; terrestrial radio owes nothing |

Add § 106A. The Visual Artists Rights Act gives authors of a narrow class of works — paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and exhibition photographs, in single copies or signed editions of two hundred or fewer — rights of attribution and integrity that exist independently of who owns the copyright or the physical object. It is unwaivable except by a signed writing identifying the specific work and use, § 106A(e)(1), and it is not a curiosity: the Second Circuit affirmed a $6.75 million award for whitewashed aerosol art in Castillo v. G&M Realty L.P., 950 F.3d 155, 162-63 (2d Cir. 2020).

Fair use is the limitation that eats the most billable hours, and the corpus treats it as a three-document set.

Fair Use After Warhol: Transformative Purpose, Market Harm, and the Four Factors is the doctrine. It traces § 107 from Folsom v. Marsh through Campbell, Google v. Oracle, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023), and it is careful about what Warhol changed and what it did not. Read it before you form a view on any fair use question, and reread the factor four section before you concede a licensing market exists.
Running a Fair Use Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide for Content, Software, and AI Training is the procedure — thirteen stages from the use statement through the opinion letter, with dedicated playbooks for a publisher, a documentary producer, a software team, and a model developer. Reach for it the week a client proposes a use, not the week a letter arrives.
Fair Use Risk Assessment Checklist: Four Factors, Documentation, and Escalation is the working paper: a numeric scoring grid, an escalation matrix keyed to who signs, and a twelve-tab clearance file. Its Phase 1 term-and-status screen is also the fastest public domain check in the corpus, which is why it appears again in Part Five below.

Two more documents belong to the limitations story even though they sit outside copyright proper. Gray Market Goods is where the exhaustion principle of § 109(a) meets its trademark counterpart; read it when a client wants to stop resale of goods it lawfully sold. Your Face Is Not Public Domain covers the parallel right clearance work keeps colliding with: owning the copyright in a photograph does not give you the right to use the face in it commercially, and the § 301 preemption line is thinner than most licensing memos assume.

Part Three — Who Owns It

The default is simple and clients disbelieve it. The author owns the copyright. § 201(a). A check is not an assignment.

Work made for hire is the only exception, and it has two routes. Route one: an employee acting within the scope of employment, where "employee" means employee under common-law agency principles, thirteen non-exclusive factors and all. Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730, 751-52 (1989). Route two: a specially ordered or commissioned work, but only if the parties sign a writing saying so and the work falls into one of nine enumerated categories in § 101 — contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, translation, supplementary work, compilation, instructional text, test, answer material for a test, or atlas.

Look at that list and notice what is missing. A logo is not on it. A standalone software application is not on it. A novel, a photograph, an architectural drawing, a brand identity system — none of them. For most contractor engagements a work-for-hire clause is not merely unnecessary, it is inoperative, and if it is the only ownership language in the agreement the contractor still owns the work.

Juniper Fell, a freelance illustrator in Missoula, signs a one-page agreement in April 2025 with a Boise brewery: $9,400, "all work performed hereunder shall be a work made for hire." She delivers a label illustration and a wordmark. The brewery believes it owns both and owns neither — the illustration is not in the nine categories, and the sentence transfers nothing because it is not phrased as an assignment. What the brewery has, at best, is an implied nonexclusive license under Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen, 908 F.2d 555, 558-59 (9th Cir. 1990): enough to keep selling the beer, not enough to register, sublicense, enforce, or sell to an acquirer. The fix costs one paragraph and has to be written before the contractor has leverage.

Who Owns the Work: Employees, Contractors, Joint Authors, and Work Made for Hire is the doctrinal spine of this Part and the second thing to read in this toolkit. It runs both work-for-hire routes, the Reid and Aymes factors, joint authorship through Childress v. Taylor, 945 F.2d 500 (2d Cir. 1991), and Aalmuhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (9th Cir. 2000), the § 204(a) writing requirement, § 205 recordation priority, and the termination rights of §§ 203 and 304(c). Read it at intake on any ownership question and reread the circuit-split section — the Second and Seventh Circuits disagree on whether the work-for-hire writing may be signed after creation — before you draft to a deadline.
Transfers, Licenses, and Termination Rights: A Practitioner's Guide to Copyright Ownership Paperwork is the execution manual: model employee and contractor clauses with the belt-and-suspenders work-for-hire-plus-present-assignment structure, the state invention-assignment statutes that constrain the employee clause, the register-then-record sequence that makes § 205(c) constructive notice actually attach, and three worked termination calendars. Reach for it when you are drafting, and again when a notice of termination arrives.
Copyright Ownership and Chain-of-Title Checklist: Assignments, Work-for-Hire, and Termination Windows turns the same material into eleven auditable phases and starts in an unexpected place — accounts payable rather than the contracts database, because the people who made your assets are the people you paid. Use it when a financing or a sale is in view and someone has asked for an IP schedule.
Assignments vs. Licenses: What's the Difference? is the short orientation on the transfer-versus-permission distinction. It is written for trademarks, but the framing carries: an assignment moves title, a license grants permission, and choosing wrong is expensive in either regime. Hand it to a client who is about to sign something and does not know which one it is.
Deploying Generative AI Without Losing Your IP and the Generative AI IP Compliance Checklist handle the newest ownership gap. The guide's central insight is that a good AI use policy manufactures registrable subject matter rather than merely prohibiting things; the checklist captures the human authorship record at creation, when it is free, instead of under a discovery deadline, when it is not. Deploy both before the first quarter in which designers use a model.

Termination deserves its own warning, because it arrives without notice thirty-five years late. A grant executed by the author on or after 1 January 1978 is terminable during a five-year window opening thirty-five years after execution, on written notice served two to ten years in advance and recorded with the Copyright Office before the effective date. § 203; 37 C.F.R. § 201.10. Failure to record is the most common way a termination fails. Baldwin v. EMI Feist Catalog, Inc., 805 F.3d 18, 26 (2d Cir. 2015). And the right cannot be contracted away — § 203(a)(5) voids agreements to the contrary, which is why a later stipulation that a work was made for hire does not work. Marvel Characters, Inc. v. Simon, 310 F.3d 280, 290-92 (2d Cir. 2002).

Practice tip. Docket the termination window the day the grant is signed. Thirty-five years from execution, minus ten, is the year the notice period opens. Whoever inherits the file will not thank you, because they will never know how close it was.

Part Four — Registration: The Formality That Is Not Optional

Section 408(a) says registration "is not a condition of copyright protection." That sentence is true and it has cost American creators more money than any other sentence in Title 17.

Three provisions do the actual work. Section 411(a) bars an infringement suit on a United States work until the Register has acted on the application — filing is not enough, as the Supreme Court settled in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, 586 U.S. 296, 301-02 (2019). Section 412 eliminates statutory damages and attorney's fees for any infringement commenced before the effective date of registration, subject to a three-month grace window running from first publication. Section 410(c) makes a certificate obtained before or within five years of first publication prima facie evidence of validity and of the facts stated in it.

The § 412 arithmetic is where cases are won and lost before anyone hires a lawyer. Infringement "commences" at the first act in a course of conduct, and every later act in that same course inherits the original date. Derek Andrew, Inc. v. Poof Apparel Corp., 528 F.3d 696, 700-01 (9th Cir. 2008). So a photographer who registers in month nine, having published in month one and been infringed in month four, gets actual damages and profits only — and actual damages for a single unlicensed photograph are often four figures, which is not a case.

What Copyright Registration Actually Buys You: Statutory Damages, Fees, and the Right to Sue is the doctrine and the arithmetic — the same facts run across five filing dates, the § 504(c) range from $750 to $150,000, the Bryant/VHT split on how to count "works," and what Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., 595 U.S. 178 (2022), did to the § 411(b) invalidity defense. Read it once for yourself and then send its opening section to every content client you have.
Registering a Copyright: A Practitioner's Guide to Applications, Deposits, and Group Registration is the operational manual: eleven stages, the hardest field on the form (whether and exactly when the work was published), the choice among the Standard and Single applications and the thirteen group options at 37 C.F.R. § 202.4, the four trade-secret alternatives for depositing source code, special handling under 37 C.F.R. § 201.3(d), and the refusal ladder that ends at the Copyright Review Board. Reach for it when you are about to open the application, and for its fee and timeline table when a client asks what this costs.
Copyright Registration Checklist: From Deposit to Certificate is the same program as eleven workable phases, and it opens with the triage nobody does first: has anyone already infringed, and is the work published. Use it as the docketing artifact and work it top to bottom; its Phase 11 gives you the four dates every registered work needs on a calendar.
Pre-Filing Trademark Application Checklist is the trademark counterpart discipline. It is not a copyright document and does not pretend to be, but the habit it enforces — confirm the owner's exact legal name, verify the dates, collect the specimens, calendar the next deadline before you file — is the same habit that keeps a copyright registration from being defective. Worth five minutes for anyone building a filing practice across both regimes.

Trap. Group registration options are keyed to publication status and dates, not to convenience. Batching a quarter's photographs into one application in April, when the earliest of them was published in January, still puts the January images outside the three-month § 412 window. Batch on the earliest publication date in the group, or file more often.

Two escape hatches are worth knowing. Special handling under 37 C.F.R. § 201.3(d) buys examination in roughly five business days for $800 per claim — trivial next to a stayed complaint, and it should be automatic whenever a written demand is going out. Preregistration under § 408(f) and 37 C.F.R. § 202.16 covers unpublished works in the classes with a history of pre-release infringement — motion pictures, sound recordings, musical compositions, literary works being prepared for publication, computer programs, and advertising photographs.

Part Five — Duration and the Public Domain Arithmetic

Nothing in copyright is more mechanical than duration, and nothing is more often guessed at. Two rules make the arithmetic tractable. First, every term expires on 31 December of the year it runs out, § 305, so you never have to know a month. Second, 1 January 1978 is the hinge: the 1976 Act governs works created on or after that date, and the 1909 Act still governs the status of everything published before it.

| Work | Governing rule | Term | |---|---|---| | Published in the US in 1930 or earlier | 1909 Act terms exhausted | Public domain. Works published in 1931 enter on 1 January 2027 | | Published 1931–1963 with notice | 28-year first term plus renewal | 95 years from publication if renewed; public domain if not. Most were never renewed — check the record, do not assume | | Published 1964–1977 with notice | Renewal automatic, Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102-307 | 95 years from publication | | Published 1978 – 28 February 1989 without notice | § 405 cure | Public domain unless cured: omission from a relatively small number of copies, or registration within five years plus reasonable effort to add notice | | Created 1978 or later, identified individual author | § 302(a) | Life of the author plus 70 years | | Joint work, 1978 or later | § 302(b) | 70 years after the death of the last surviving author | | Work made for hire, anonymous, or pseudonymous | § 302(c) | 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first | | Created before 1978, never published or registered | § 303(a) | The § 302 term, but never before 31 December 2002; if published on or before 31 December 2002, never before 31 December 2047 | | Sound recording fixed before 15 February 1972 | § 1401 | 100 years from publication (1923–1946); 110 years (1947–1956); 15 February 2067 for everything from 1957 forward | | Foreign work in the US public domain solely for formalities | § 104A | Restored effective 1 January 1996, upheld in Golan v. Holder, 565 U.S. 302 (2012) |

Now the worked example. Sextant Press, a publisher in Camden, Maine, wants to reprint eleven chart plates from Coastal Pilotage of the Gulf of Maine, published in 1938 by Ferriday & Cole with a proper notice. The editor assumes it is old enough to be free. It is not old enough for that to be automatic. Under the 1909 Act the first term ran twenty-eight years, expiring at the end of 1966 unless Ferriday & Cole or a successor filed a renewal during the twenty-eighth year. If a renewal was filed, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 carried the total to ninety-five years from publication — protection through 31 December 2033. If no renewal was filed, the plates have been in the public domain since 1 January 1967 and Sextant can print them tomorrow.

The whole question turns on a records search: the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1965 and 1966, plus the Copyright Office's online records for anything recorded from 1978 forward. That search costs a few hours; guessing costs a print run. Do not stop at the book — a 1938 volume can carry separately renewed contributions, and if Sextant adds new cartographic labeling to a public domain plate, its copyright covers the labeling and nothing underneath it. Feist, 499 U.S. at 345.

Three Marksy documents carry the term-screening habit:

Fair Use Risk Assessment Checklist: Four Factors, Documentation, and Escalation runs the fastest term-and-status screen in the corpus in its Phase 1, with the pre-1978 notice trap called out explicitly. Use it as the first pass on any archival material, because a work in the public domain needs no fair use analysis at all.
Running a Fair Use Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide for Content, Software, and AI Training puts the same screen at Stage 1b, ahead of the four-factor work, and pairs it with the owner-identification step that turns a term question into a licensing decision. It is the right sequence: term first, owner second, factors third.
Two Copyrights, One Song carries the CLASSICS Act schedule for pre-1972 recordings, which is the one duration table nobody remembers and everybody needs the moment a documentary uses archival audio.

Trap. Renewal status is not a fact about the work; it is a fact about the record. A 1952 photograph published in a magazine may have been covered by the magazine's renewal, separately renewed by the photographer, or not renewed at all, and the three outcomes are indistinguishable from the copy in your hand. Write down what you searched and when, and keep it — a documented reasonable search is also the predicate for the § 1401(c) noncommercial-use safe harbor and for arguing against willfulness if you get it wrong.

Part Six — Notice, CMI, and the Two Formalities That Still Pay

Copyright notice stopped being mandatory for works published on or after 1 March 1989, when the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 took effect. It did not stop being useful.

Sections 401(d) and 402(d) provide that if a proper notice appears on the published copy to which the defendant had access, no weight is given to a defense of innocent infringement in mitigation of damages. That matters because § 504(c)(2) lets a court reduce a statutory award to as low as $200 for an innocent infringer. A notice consisting of the symbol, the year of first publication, and the owner's name costs nothing and removes a $29,800 argument.

Notice carries a quieter function too: it is where a would-be licensee looks to find you. A large share of unlicensed use is not piracy but orphan-work fatalism — somebody wanted to license the image, could not identify the owner in twenty minutes, and used it anyway.

Copyright management information is the digital descendant. Section 1202(a) makes it unlawful to knowingly provide or distribute false CMI with intent to induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement. Section 1202(b) reaches intentional removal or alteration of CMI, and distribution of works knowing CMI has been removed, where the defendant knows or has reasonable grounds to know this will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement. The double scienter requirement is the whole ballgame, and generic allegations of that second element fail. Stevens v. CoreLogic, Inc., 899 F.3d 666, 673-75 (9th Cir. 2018). What counts as CMI is broader than metadata: a gutter credit beside a photograph qualifies, Murphy v. Millennium Radio Group LLC, 650 F.3d 295, 300-05 (3d Cir. 2011), as do bylines, copyright notices, terms of use, and identifying numbers referring to that information, § 1202(c).

Return to Ostrom Analytics. A competitor scrapes 2,400 of its rate-schedule pages and strips the "© 2024 Ostrom Analytics" footer and the embedded XMP rights statement from every downloaded PDF before republishing them. Ostrom's underlying copyright claim is thin — these are largely facts. Its § 1202(b) claim is not. Statutory damages under § 1203(c)(3)(B) run $2,500 to $25,000 per violation, and because § 412's bar is written in terms of infringement of copyright, courts have generally allowed § 1203 recovery on works whose registration was untimely. On a portfolio where § 412 has already stripped the statutory damages, the CMI count is frequently the only real money in the case.

Where it is genuinely unsettled: several courts require that the CMI have been removed from an identical copy of the work rather than from a modified or partial reproduction. The circuits have not converged, and a claim that is strong in one district is dismissible in another. Plead the double scienter specifically, and plead the identicality facts if you have them.

Copyright Infringement Complaint Checklist: Registration, Elements, Venue, and Remedies contains the best operational treatment of the CMI count in the corpus, including the metadata comparison — EXIF, IPTC, XMP, ICC profile, file hash — that supplies the factual core of the claim. Run its Phase 2 evidence capture before you send any demand, because the metadata disappears the moment the defendant reuploads.
The DMCA Safe Harbor: How Section 512 Shields Platforms and Binds Rights Holders covers the other half of the DMCA — the four safe harbors, red-flag knowledge, repeat-infringer policies, and § 512(f) misrepresentation liability. Read it before you advise any platform, and before you send a notice on behalf of a rights holder, because the same statute constrains both sides.
Sending and Fighting a DMCA Takedown and the DMCA Takedown Notice Checklist are the fastest, cheapest enforcement route available to an unregistered copyright owner, which makes them the right first tool when § 412 has already foreclosed a real damages case. The guide's Lenz fair use step is not optional; skipping it is how a takedown becomes a § 512(f) counterclaim.

A Suggested Reading Path

Pick the branch that matches your situation. Each is ordered, and each assumes you have already read the "if you read only one thing" article above.

Branch A — Somebody is copying my client's work, right now.

What Copyright Registration Actually Buys You — establish what the claim is worth before spending anything on it. Registration date first, always.
Copyright Registration Checklist — if the work is unregistered, file today with special handling. Every day of delay is another day of infringement outside § 412.
Proving Copyright Infringement — test whether what was taken is protected expression or unprotectable fact and idea.
Sending and Fighting a DMCA Takedown — the cheap remedy, available immediately.
Copyright Infringement Complaint Checklist, then Filing a Copyright Infringement Complaint in Federal Court — if it is going to court.

Branch B — We are papering a company's title before a financing or a sale.

Who Owns the Work — learn the two work-for-hire routes cold before you open a single contract.
Copyright Ownership and Chain-of-Title Checklist — run the audit from accounts payable.
Transfers, Licenses, and Termination Rights — draft the confirmatory assignments and sequence register-then-record.
Registering a Copyright — because § 205(c) constructive notice requires registration first.
IP Due Diligence Toolkit for Mergers, Financings, and Asset Sales — for the schedule, the reps, and the encumbrance search.

Branch C — A creator or small company is filing for the first time.

What Copyright Registration Actually Buys You, the opening section only. It is the motivation.
Registering a Copyright — Stages 2 and 3 in particular. Publication status and application choice decide the rest.
Copyright Registration Checklist — work it top to bottom, then docket the four dates in Phase 11.
The Solo and Small Firm IP Practice Toolkit — for turning this into a repeatable, profitable program rather than a one-off.

Branch D — We want to use somebody else's material.

Term and status screen first: Fair Use Risk Assessment Checklist, Phase 1. A public domain work needs nothing else.
Fair Use After Warhol — the doctrine, especially factors one and four.
Running a Fair Use Analysis — the worksheet, the scoring grid, and the permission decision.
If it is music: Clearing a Track and the Music Clearance Checklist. If it is a person's face, voice, or name: Your Face Is Not Public Domain.

Primary Authorities

| Authority | Rule or holding | |---|---| | 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) | Copyright subsists in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium; eight illustrative categories | | 17 U.S.C. § 102(b) | No protection for any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery | | 17 U.S.C. § 101 ("fixed," "work made for hire," "publication") | Fixation must be by or under the author's authority; work for hire has two exclusive routes and nine closed categories | | 17 U.S.C. § 106 | Six exclusive rights: reproduction, derivative works, distribution, public performance, public display, digital audio transmission | | 17 U.S.C. § 106A | Attribution and integrity rights in works of visual art; waivable only by a signed writing identifying the work and use | | 17 U.S.C. §§ 107, 109(a) | Fair use and its four factors; first sale exhausts the distribution right in a lawfully made copy | | 17 U.S.C. § 201 | Copyright vests initially in the author; for a work made for hire, in the employer | | 17 U.S.C. § 204(a) | A transfer of copyright ownership is invalid unless in a writing signed by the conveying party | | 17 U.S.C. § 205(c)-(d) | Recordation gives constructive notice only if the work is registered; priority turns on a one-month domestic recordation window | | 17 U.S.C. §§ 203, 304(c)-(d) | Author grants are terminable in five-year windows at 35, 56, or 75 years; agreements to the contrary are void | | 17 U.S.C. §§ 302-305 | Life plus 70; 95 or 120 years for works made for hire and anonymous works; all terms end on 31 December | | 17 U.S.C. §§ 401(d), 402(d), 405 | Proper notice defeats the innocent-infringement mitigation of § 504(c)(2); cure for notice omitted 1978-1989 | | 17 U.S.C. §§ 410(c), 411(a), 412 | Prima facie validity within five years of publication; registration as a precondition to suit; the statutory damages and fees cutoff | | 17 U.S.C. §§ 1202-1203 | Falsifying or stripping copyright management information, with double scienter; $2,500-$25,000 per violation | | 28 U.S.C. §§ 1338(a), 1400(a) | Exclusive federal jurisdiction; venue where the defendant or its agent may be found | | 37 C.F.R. §§ 201.3(d), 201.10, 202.4, 202.20 | Special handling; termination notices; group registration options; deposit rules | | Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) | Originality requires independent creation plus a modicum of creativity; sweat of the brow is not enough | | Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99 (1879) | A copyright in a book explaining a system confers no exclusive rights in the system | | Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc., 580 U.S. 405 (2017) | Separability: the feature must be perceivable as art apart from the useful article and protectable on its own | | Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) | Government edicts, including legislator-authored annotations, are uncopyrightable | | Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989) | "Employee" in § 101 means employee under common-law agency principles | | Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen, 908 F.2d 555 (9th Cir. 1990) | No signed writing, no transfer — but conduct can create an implied nonexclusive license | | Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, 586 U.S. 296 (2019) | "Registration has been made" means the Register acted, not that an application was filed | | Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., 595 U.S. 178 (2022) | Section 411(b)'s knowledge requirement covers mistakes of law as well as fact | | Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023) | Factor one asks about the specific use, its purpose, its commerciality, and whether the copying was justified | | Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013) | First sale applies to copies lawfully made abroad | | Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003) | The 20-year term extension of the CTEA is within Congress's power | | Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy, 601 U.S. 366 (2024) | A timely claim under the discovery rule carries damages for the full infringement period; accrual left undecided |

Forms and Templates

Said plainly: the Marksy template library is trademark-first, and it holds no copyright assignment form, license form, or notice-of-termination form. What the corpus has instead is model language embedded inside the copyright guides and checklists, which is frequently better than a standalone form because the reasoning comes attached.

Copyright assignment and employee/contractor IP language lives in Transfers, Licenses, and Termination Rights, Stages 2 through 4 — the work-for-hire-plus-present-assignment structure, the state invention-assignment notices, and third-party and open-source representations. Start there, not from a blank page. Notice of termination content, service, and recordation language is in the same guide at Stage 10, walked line by line against 37 C.F.R. § 201.10.
Application field language — transfer statements, limitation of claim, AI disclaimers, special handling declarations, and a first request for reconsideration — is in Registering a Copyright.
Trademark Assignment Agreement — Template is the structural model when you need a short-form recordable instrument. Adapt it carefully: a copyright short-form assignment attaches a schedule of registrations and applications, must satisfy § 204(a), and must not carry over the goodwill recital that trademark law requires and copyright law does not.
Trademark License Agreement — Template and How to Draft a Trademark License Agreement are useful here mainly as contrast: a copyright license needs no quality-control provision to stay valid, and the absence of a naked-licensing doctrine is one of the genuine structural differences between the two regimes.
Trademark Portfolio Inventory — Template is the closest thing in the library to a works register. Its columns — owner, filing date, registration number, next deadline — transfer directly, with effective date of registration and first publication date substituted for the trademark fields.

Related Toolkits and Checklists

Copyright Enforcement Toolkit: Takedowns, Demands, and Federal Litigation is the direct sequel. Where this toolkit establishes that a right exists, is owned, is registered, and has not expired, that one spends it. Go there the moment a matter becomes adversarial.
Fair Use and Permissions Toolkit is the mirror image, written for the user rather than the owner, and it handles the three-way collision of copyright, trademark, and publicity rights that clearance work actually presents.
AI, Content, and IP Toolkit takes the two hardest open questions here — what can be authored, and what can be trained on — and gives them the extended treatment they no longer fit inside a fundamentals document.
IP Due Diligence Toolkit for Mergers, Financings, and Asset Sales is where the chain-of-title material in Part Three gets used under deal pressure, across trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, domains, and data.
Evidence and Expert Witness Toolkit matters earlier than people expect. The deposit copy you file today is the exhibit a musicologist or software expert will compare years from now — which is why the registration checklist tells you to archive a byte-identical copy with a hash.
Music, Film, and Creative Industry IP Toolkit and the Website and App Launch IP Toolkit apply everything above to the two industries where it comes up hardest. Read whichever matches the client in front of you.
The Solo and Small Firm IP Practice Toolkit answers the question this toolkit raises and does not solve: how to run registration and chain-of-title work profitably at volume, for clients who cannot pay for bespoke analysis on every asset.