Industry & Advocacy News
August 19, 2026
The Authors Guild has updated the language in its model trade book contract to provide an alternative clause regarding copyright registration that more clearly spells out the publisher’s obligation to register the copyright in the work with the U.S. Copyright Office and gives authors the chance to cure the publisher’s failure to do so before the statutory 3-month window expires. We are urging authors and agents to insist that publishers include these terms in their publishing contracts to ensure that authors obtain timely copyright registration so they may have the full range of legal protections against infringement.
Although registration is not required for a work to be protected by copyright, it is required in most cases to bring a lawsuit for infringement. Timely registration is also required for the copyright owner to be eligible for attorney’s fees and statutory damages (meaning that actual damages do not need to be proven). Statutory damages can range from $750 to $30,000 per work for unintended infringement and up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. To qualify for these statutory damages and for the ability to claim attorneys’ fees, a work must be registered before the infringement commences or within three months after the work was first published.
An author can still bring an infringement lawsuit even if they do not register within these time frames; they just will not be eligible for statutory damages or attorneys’ fees. But as a practical matter, eligibility for these remedies is often a determining factor in determining whether a lawsuit is financially viable and so critical to allowing the author to bring a suit at all. Given the high costs of litigation, many attorneys will not agree to take on copyright infringement lawsuit without the possibility of statutory damages and fees.
U.S. copyright law also provides that if a work is registered within five years of publication, then all the facts in the registration are presumed correct and do not need to be proven by the plaintiff in an infringement lawsuit. Without this presumption, the author or other rightsholder has to provide proof that they own the copyright and of other facts such as author and date of publication, which adds additional costs and other burdens to litigation.
The $1.5 billion settlement in the Anthropic class action case has underscored how critical it is for authors to have their works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office in a timely manner. The settlement covers only books that were (i) registered within five years of publication and (ii) were registered either before being downloaded by Anthropic or within three months of publication. We understand that many titles may have been left out of the settlement because their publisher failed to register their book in time.
To prevent these types of mistakes from occurring in the future—and to ensure that authors have the full range of tools to enforce their copyrights—we have updated our model trade book contract to more clearly define the publishers’ registration obligations, to allow the publisher or author to cure the default in time, and to provide specific penalties if the publisher fails to comply. Under these provisions, the publisher must submit a complete registration application in the author’s name to the Copyright Office within 60 days after the book is first published and send written confirmation of submission to the author or agent. Once the Copyright Office registers the work, the publisher must send the author a true and correct copy of the registration certificate.
If the publisher doesn’t register the work within the required time period, it can “cure” the violation if it registers the book within 10 days after being notified by the author, except that this grace period ends 75 days after first publication. This ensures that the author will still have time to register the copyright themselves within the three-month statutory window if the publisher still hasn’t done so after 75 days. The Publisher must reimburse the author’s costs in this situation.
Importantly, the new language provides that the publisher’s failure to meet these obligations constitutes a “material breach” of the contract. This means that the author can terminate the contract and sue the publisher for monetary damages.
Again, the Guild believes that every trade publisher and university press contract should include these terms. If a publisher does not currently have them in their standard contract, authors and agents should insist they add them.
The Copyright Office website has a wealth of resources on registration, including a Registration Toolkit that covers the basics of copyright and walks creators through the registration process. Download the Copyright Registration Toolkit here (pdf). In addition, the Authors Guild website includes a page on the fundamentals and benefits of registration for authors.
