Collection vs. Individual Copyright Registration

According to a post by Heather Hummel on the Huffington Post’s blog:

Last spring when I discovered eight of my own images had been copyright infringed, I became particularly passionate about the legal rights of artists. I was fortunate that I had done a few things to help with protecting my work. One step was including a copyright statement, which is clearly stated, on my website. But, the most important step I took was not only registering my copyrights, but doing so in a timely manner. As such, several of my images that were stolen had already been registered with the U.S. Copyright Officeupon infringement. I can attest that it was worth the few pennies per image to do so.

For example, the fee for me to register 184 photos for 2013 and 134 photos for 2014 was $55 per batch.

This photographer registered copyright in her photographs by batching her photos and registering as a collection (the Copyright Office’s term is “collection,” not “batch”). This is a perfectly viable way to register copyright. It is cost-effective and it has teeth.

But wait.

A copyright infringement award is based on the percentage of the copyrighted work that is infringed. If the photographer registers only one or a very few photos in each registration and eats the $55/registration package fee, the percentage of the work that is infringed increases, here potentially by 100-fold or more.

Look at it this way. If you register 100 photos in one collection and someone infringes one of those photos, your maximum infringed percentage is 1%. Your recovery is 1% of the maximum recovery allowed for that infringement. If, though, you register 10 photos in one batch, your maximum infringed percentage is 10% and your potential recovery increases by a factor of 10. If you register each photo individually, your infringed percentage is potentially 100% and your recovery increases by a factor of 100.

It’s a trade-off, though; many photographers don’t want to spend $55 to register each and every photo; that simply gets cost-prohibitive very quickly. And that’s okay, as long as each photographer understands that the potential recovery for infringement goes down with increasing numbers of photos in the collection.