Guide
Copyright Claims Board: what a $100 claim against a copycat buys, and what happens to it
Written September 2, 2026 by Josh Pigford
The Copyright Claims Board (CCB) is a small-claims tribunal inside the U.S. Copyright Office that hears copyright disputes for $40 to file and $60 more if the case goes active. No lawyer is required and there is no court appearance. For a brand whose product photos were lifted, it fits one narrow case: the copycat is a nameable person or company in the United States, your photos are registered or the application is already filed, and you want money rather than the listing gone. It cannot order anybody to take a listing down.
Across 1,987 closed Copyright Claims Board cases through September 2, 2026, Knockoff found that 50.9% closed with no service-stage document on the docket, meaning the claim was never served on anybody (n=1,011). It is not in any of the official summaries. Counting differently, the Copyright Office put 787 of 1,920 claims filed through March 2026, 41.0%, in its own dismissed-after-compliance-review bucket.
The short version
- $100 in Board fees, split $40 at filing and $60 when the case goes active.
- A registration, or a complete application already delivered, is required before you can file.
- The copycat can opt out within 60 days of being served, and the case is then dismissed.
- A claim against someone residing outside the United States is not permitted.
- You have to serve the respondent yourself within 90 days, and the Board will not identify them for you.
- The Board can award money. It cannot order a takedown unless the respondent agrees to one.
- Statutory damages cap at $15,000 per work, and total recovery in one proceeding cannot exceed $30,000.
What the Copyright Claims Board can and cannot do for you
Congress created the CCB in the CASE Act, signed December 27, 2020, and it opened for filings on June 16, 2022. Three Copyright Claims Officers sit inside the Copyright Office and decide cases on paper. It is not a court. 17 U.S.C. 1504(a) makes the whole thing voluntary, and 1507(a) says a determination "may not be cited or relied upon as legal precedent" outside the exceptions in that subsection and section 1508.
Start with the limit that decides most cases for a brand owner. The Board cannot make a listing disappear. The Copyright Claims Board handbook says it "cannot order a respondent to cease the complained of activity unless the respondent agrees to such an order if found liable." Money is the remedy. If your goal is the copied listing off the marketplace this week, you are reading about the wrong tool, and the notice that does remove a listing is free.
Five more gates sit in front of you before any of that matters.
- The copycat has to be in the United States. 17 U.S.C. 1504(d)(4) excludes "A claim or counterclaim asserted against a person or entity residing outside of the United States", unless that party started the proceeding itself. Service is bounded the same way: 1506(g)(9) says service and waiver of personal service "may only be effected within the United States." An overseas seller is outside this system entirely.
- You need a registration, or an application already delivered. 17 U.S.C. 1505(a) bars a claim unless the owner "has first delivered a completed application, a deposit, and the required fee for registration" and the certificate "has either been issued or has not been refused." A pending application gets you in the door, but 1505(b) holds the proceeding in abeyance until the certificate issues, lets the Board dismiss without prejudice after a year in abeyance, and 1505(b)(3) dismisses without prejudice if the registration is refused.
- The copying has to be recent. 17 U.S.C. 1504(b)(1) requires a claim to be commenced "not later than 3 years after the claim accrued." One useful thing runs the other way: 1504(b)(2) tolls the federal three-year clock in section 507(b) for a district court action on the same claim while the CCB proceeding is pending, so filing here does not quietly burn your court option.
- The respondent can walk away. 17 U.S.C. 1506(i) gives them "a period of 60 days, beginning on the date of service" to opt out, and 37 C.F.R. 223.1(a) dismisses the proceeding without prejudice when they do. Nothing you can do stops it. The pressure that exists runs the other way: 1506(h)(1) says a respondent who does not opt out loses the chance to have the dispute decided by an Article III court and waives the right to a jury trial.
- The ceiling is low. Statutory damages "may not exceed $15,000 for each work infringed" where the work was timely registered under section 412, and drop to $7,500 per work with a $15,000 cap in any one proceeding where it was not. Actual damages and the copycat's profits are available instead under 1504(e)(1)(A)(i), which also lets the Board weigh whether the other side agreed to stop. Either way, total monetary recovery in one proceeding cannot exceed $30,000, and the smaller claims track at 37 C.F.R. 226.1 is for cases seeking $5,000 or less. 1504(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III) bars the Board from finding, or even considering, that the copying was willful, so the multiplier a federal court can apply does not exist here.
One thing it does do well: it is the only small-claims route that exists. 28 U.S.C. 1338(a) gives federal district courts jurisdiction over copyright cases "exclusive of the courts of the states", so your county small claims court cannot hear this at all. Attorneys are optional, there are no in-person appearances, discovery is limited to documents, written interrogatories and requests for admission, and testimony is written and sworn. The Copyright Office reported that 66.6% of claimants were self-represented, and that 36% of claims involved pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, which is the official category label that covers a product photograph. Both figures are as of December 31, 2025.
What actually happens to a CCB claim
The Copyright Office publishes a statistics sheet, and it is the number to start from. As of March 2026, covering June 2022 through March 2026, 1,920 claims had been filed. 787 were dismissed after compliance review. 272 were dismissed because valid proof of service was never filed. Respondents opted out in 168. There were 154 requests to withdraw and 155 settlements. Twenty five proceedings reached a contested final determination and 22 reached a default final determination, so 47 determinations in total out of 1,920 claims.
That sheet does not say how long any of it takes, does not break the outcomes down by year, and does not say how many claims ever reached a hearing. So we pulled the docket ourselves. On September 2, 2026 Knockoff pulled all 2,244 published cases from dockets.ccb.gov, 22-CCB-0001 through 26-CCB-0562, and sorted each closed case by the set of document types on its docket. 1,987 of the 2,244 were closed.
| Outcome | Copyright Office, of 1,920 claims filed, March 2026 | Knockoff, of 1,987 closed cases, September 2, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Never served: dismissed after compliance review (Office) against closed with no service-stage document at all (ours) | 787 of 1,920 claims filed, 41.0% | 1,011 (50.9%) |
| Served, but no valid proof of service filed | 272 | 322 (16.2%) |
| Withdrawn or settled, counted as one bucket | 309, being 154 withdrawals and 155 settlements | 303 (15.2%) |
| Respondent opted out | 168 | 191 (9.6%) |
| Dismissed after service, other reasons | Not reported separately | 89 (4.5%) |
| Default final determination | 22 | 28 (1.4%) |
| Contested final determination | 25 | 19 (1.0%) |
| Dismissed for failure to prosecute | Not reported separately | 4 (0.2%) |
| Other or unclassified | Not applicable | 20 (1.0%) |
67.1%
closed with no response from the other side
1,011 cases that were never served plus 322 that reached the service stage without proof of service is 1,333 of 1,987 closed cases, or 67.1%. That is our arithmetic on the two rows above, not a Copyright Office figure. As of September 2, 2026.
Read the two biggest rows together and you have the story of this tribunal. 1,011 closed cases carry no service-stage document of any kind, so the claim never reached the other side. Another 322 got as far as the service stage and then closed with no proof of service, no waiver and no response on the docket. That is 1,333 of 1,987 closed cases, 67.1% by our arithmetic, that ended with nothing from the respondent. Only 259 of all 2,244 cases, 11.5%, ever produced a scheduling document, which is the first sign of the active phase. A response to the claim was filed in 121 cases, 5.4%, hearing documents appear in 10, and the second filing fee was actually paid in 235 cases, 10.5%.
The problem is getting worse, not better. Taking filing-year cohorts from the docket-number prefix, the share of closed cases that were never served runs 41.2% for the 2022 cohort (115 of 279), 45.9% for 2023 (192 of 418) and 51.1% for 2024 (204 of 399). Those three cohorts are effectively finished, which is why they are the only ones we publish. The 2025 and 2026 cohorts are left out entirely: most of their claims were still open at the pull date, so a closed-case share for them measures how quickly an ending arrives rather than which ending it is.
The mechanism behind that column is a noncompliance order. In 1,227 of 2,244 cases, 54.7%, the claim had to be amended after the Board found something wrong with it, and a claim that never clears review never gets a notice directing you to serve. The Copyright Office measured the same thing on its own data and with its own denominator: as of December 31, 2025, only 43% of all claims filed were found compliant, and 63% of claims received at least one noncompliance order or were dismissed as unsuitable. The paperwork is where claims go to die, and the Copyright Office's February 2026 report to Congress recommended cutting the two amendment opportunities down to one.
Two more shapes from the docket are worth carrying into your own decision. 1,752 of 2,244 cases, 78.1%, name exactly one respondent. This is a one-against-one forum, not a way to sweep up a ring of copycat sellers in a single filing, and a brand facing six sellers is facing six filings, six service problems and six $40 fees. Filing is also concentrated: 46.2% of claimant-case pairs come from claimants with two or more claims (n=2,359 claimant-case pairs, pulled September 2, 2026).
Takedown notice, copyright small claims, or federal court
These three do different jobs and most people pick the wrong one because they think of them as escalating versions of the same thing. They are not. Only one of them removes a listing. Only one reaches a seller in another country.
| Question | Takedown notice | Copyright Claims Board | Federal court |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Nothing but your time | $40 plus $60, plus $45 to $65 to register | $405 to file, and counsel on top |
| How long it takes | Days on most platforms | Median 84 days to a closed case (n=1,987) | Months to years |
| Removes the listing? | Yes, that is the whole job | No, unless the respondent agrees to stop | Yes, by injunction under 17 U.S.C. 502 |
| Gets you money? | No | Up to $30,000 per proceeding | No statutory ceiling |
| Needs a registration? | No | Yes, or a complete application delivered | Yes, and it must have issued (17 U.S.C. 411(a)) |
| Works against an overseas seller? | Yes, the platform is the target | No, excluded by 17 U.S.C. 1504(d)(4) | In theory, in practice rarely worth it |
| Can the other side just refuse? | They can file a counter notice | Yes, opt out within 60 days of service | No |
| Is the result binding? | No, it is a platform decision | Yes on the parties, and not precedent | Yes |
For a DTC brand, the ordinary sequence runs left to right and usually stops in the first column. Send the notice, the listing comes down, you move on. The Board becomes interesting only when the notice route has failed or run out: the seller filed a counter notice and the copy is going back up, or the same US seller has done it four times and you want a paper judgment with their name on it. Which report form each platform actually uses is the place to start, and a notice generator that fills in the statutory elements produces the document itself.
The CCB hears copyright claims only, so a stolen brand name goes somewhere else, and which right covers which part of a copied listing settles that before you pick a door.
Knockoff sits in the first column. It watches your product photos across marketplaces and the open web, confirms a match only when your photograph appears in the seller's own listing gallery, and prepares each case as a takedown package with the archived page, a timestamped screenshot and the notice already written. You approve it, a person here reads the notice, and you submit it through the platform's own form. It is not a substitute for a claim at the Board and it does not make one for you. See what a prepared case contains.
The money and the calendar
The filing fee is split in two. 37 C.F.R. 201.3 sets a $40 first payment to initiate a proceeding and a $60 second payment when the case moves into its active phase, which is $100 in Board fees for a case that goes the distance. In our docket pull, a second filing fee was ordered in 266 cases and actually paid in 235, as of September 2, 2026.
Registration is the other bill, and for a product catalog it is the cheaper half. A single application, one work by one author, is $45. A standard electronic application is $65. A group of published or unpublished photographs is $55, and 37 C.F.R. 202.4(h)(2) caps that group at 750 photographs. There is also a $50 expedited registration fee built specifically for small claims, which is the route to take when the copying already happened and you have nothing on file. Registering a catalog of product photos walks through which of those applications fits. Filing a claim without a registration or a complete application already delivered gets the claim dismissed, and the $40 is not refunded.
Compare that with the alternative. A federal copyright suit carries a $405 filing fee, which is the $350 statutory fee plus a $55 administrative fee. The number people quote for what the suit itself costs is an AIPLA economic survey figure of more than $275,000 on average, reported secondhand in the legal literature rather than confirmed from AIPLA directly, so treat it as an order of magnitude and not a quote. The order of magnitude is the point: $100 against six figures.
Now the calendar, and here the two sources measure different things. From our docket pull, the median closed case ran 84 days from first document to last (n=1,987). By outcome, the medians are 59 days to a case that closed never served (n=1,011), 101 days to an opt-out dismissal (n=191), 118 days to a case that closed with no proof of service (n=322), and 146 days from filing to the first scheduling document for the 259 cases that reached the active phase. Separately, the Copyright Office reported an average of 518 days to a determination, 615 for contested cases and 438 for defaults, as of December 31, 2025. That 518 is the average for the roughly 43 proceedings that reached a determination. It is not the wait on a filed claim, and almost every page that quotes it treats it as though it were.
What the winners won: the Copyright Office reported that damages were awarded in nearly 72% of final determinations, with an average award of $3,598.58, a low of $750 and a high of $11,000, as of December 31, 2025. Contested determinations averaged $2,392.17 and defaults averaged $4,360.53. Read the denominator carefully. That $3,598.58 is the average of the roughly 31 determinations that awarded anything, being nearly 72% of the 43 determinations issued, out of more than 1,700 claims filed.
Two dockets show the shape of a photograph case. In Urbanlip.com Ltd. v. Faviana International Inc., 22-CCB-0137, a default determination adopted November 1, 2023 awarded $2,600 for a photograph used on a fashion e-commerce site. In Hursey v. Lavaca LLC, 22-CCB-0056, a default on August 24, 2023 awarded $3,000 for a photographer's image used in product advertising. In both, the claimant was a photographer or a photo agency rather than a product brand, which is the pattern across this docket.
A determination is also not money in your account. 17 U.S.C. 1508(a) makes you apply to a federal district court to confirm the award and reduce it to judgment, within one year of the determination, the resolution of reconsideration or Register review, or an amended determination, whichever occurs last. The one consolation in that section is that the court "shall impose on the party who failed to pay" the reasonable expenses of getting the order, including attorney's fees.
Filing a CCB claim, step by step
Ten stages. The ones that kill claims are the third and the fourth.
- 1. Register the photos, or deliver the application. 17 U.S.C. 1505(a) is the gate, and you cannot argue your way past it. A group registration of photographs at $55 covers up to 750 images, which is usually the right shape for a catalog. If nothing is on file yet, the $50 expedited small-claims registration exists for exactly this moment.
- 2. File the claim in eCCB and pay $40. eCCB is the Board's own filing system, and the Board's start or access a claim page is where an account begins. You pick a track at filing: standard, or the smaller claims track for cases seeking $5,000 or less. 37 C.F.R. 226.2 lets you change tracks before the initial notice is served, and after that only with consent and leave.
- 3. Survive compliance review. An attorney at the Board reads the claim before the other side ever sees it. 17 U.S.C. 1506(f)(1)(B) gives you two chances to amend, 30 days each, and both are without an additional filing fee. Fail twice and the claim is dismissed without prejudice. This is the wall: 54.7% of all cases picked up at least one noncompliance order, and 1,011 of 1,987 closed cases have no service-stage document at all, which means they never got past this step.
- 4. Serve the respondent within 90 days. Once the Board sends a notice of compliance and directs you to serve, 17 U.S.C. 1506(g) gives you 90 days to serve and file proof of it, and proof of service is due within 7 days of serving. Personal service or a signed waiver only. Email does not count. A waiver does not extend the 90 days. Companies are served through a service agent, and the Register keeps a public Designated Service Agent Directory: on September 2, 2026 it listed Amazon.com Services LLC and Google LLC with their agents, and returned no results for Etsy, Shopify or Meta. Not being in the directory does not mean a company cannot be served, only that you have to find the right registered agent yourself.
- 5. Know that a store handle is not a respondent. The Board's own service handbook says it "will not issue subpoenas or help identify respondents." A seller name on a marketplace is not a person you can serve. Getting a real identity behind an anonymous store generally means a section 512(h) subpoena from a district court clerk, which is a separate filing with its own paperwork, and courts have quashed those on First Amendment and fair-use grounds. If all you have is a handle, deal with the platform instead: the three routes for reporting a Shopify store covers the case where the operator is anonymous.
- 6. Wait out the 60-day opt-out. The clock runs from the date of service. If the respondent opts out, the proceeding is dismissed without prejudice and your federal court option is still there. An opt-out document appears in 200 of the 2,244 cases we pulled, 8.9%.
- 7. Pay the second $60 and go active. The active phase brings a scheduling order, a response, limited discovery and written party statements. In our pull, only 259 of 2,244 cases ever got that far.
- 8. Get a determination on the papers. No in-person hearings. Written testimony under penalty of perjury, no formal rules of evidence, decided by a preponderance of the evidence, and where a hearing is held at least two officers sit. If the respondent was served, did not opt out and never appeared, the default track applies and you still have to submit evidence of the claim and of damages.
- 9. Collect it. Take the determination to a federal district court under 17 U.S.C. 1508(a) within the one-year window and have it reduced to judgment. The expenses of doing that get shifted onto the party who failed to pay.
- 10. If you lose, or the award is wrong. 17 U.S.C. 1506(w) allows a request for reconsideration within 30 days, for a clear error of law or fact material to the outcome or a technical mistake. If that is denied, 1506(x) allows review by the Register of Copyrights, at $300 under 37 C.F.R. 201.3, limited to whether denying reconsideration was an abuse of discretion. A district court will only look at it under 1508(c) for fraud, corruption, misrepresentation or misconduct, for exceeding authority or failing to render a determination, or for excusable neglect on a default.
When the Copyright Claims Board is the wrong tool
Most of the time, for most brands, it is.
- The copycat is overseas. This is the common case for a DTC brand and it ends the analysis. 17 U.S.C. 1504(d)(4) does not permit the claim, and service cannot be made abroad. The free takedown notice reaches the listing no matter where the seller sits, because the notice goes to the platform.
- All you have is a store handle. The Board will not identify anyone for you. Without a name and an address, there is nothing to serve, and 322 of 1,987 closed cases in our pull reached the service stage and then closed with no proof of service on the docket.
- The photos are not registered and nothing is on file. A takedown notice needs no registration. A claim at the Board does. If you are starting from zero, register first and send the notice while the application is in the queue.
- What was copied is the product, not the photograph. Copyright follows the image. A knocked-off product shape is a design patent or trade dress question, and what the law protects when the look of a product is copied is the right starting point instead.
- Your losses are well past $30,000. The per-proceeding ceiling is a hard cap, and $5,000 on the smaller claims track. Real damage on that scale belongs in front of a lawyer, not a $100 filing.
- You need the listing gone this week. The Board has no takedown power at all. Even a win is a piece of paper you then take to a district court to convert into a judgment.
- The respondent is a large platform with in-house counsel. You are the pro se side of an asymmetric fight, in a forum they can leave in 60 days by filing one form.
The counter-argument to this whole page is simple. For the ordinary copied-photo case, the takedown notice is free, it works in days, it reaches sellers the Board cannot touch, and it does the thing you actually want, which is the copy off the marketplace. The Board is for the residue: a US seller who came back after a counter notice, a repeat operator you can name and serve, a case where money is the point.
If a copycat filed a false takedown against you
A competitor sends a takedown notice against your listing, claiming your own photographs, and the platform pulls your product. 17 U.S.C. 512(f) makes a knowing material misrepresentation actionable, and a 512(f) claim is one of the three types the CCB hears. It is a real slice of the docket: the Copyright Office counted 1,503 copyright claims, 301 misrepresentation claims and 67 requests for a declaration of noninfringement as of December 31, 2025. In our docket pull, bad-faith conduct was raised in 116 of 2,244 cases, 5.2%. The cheaper first move is usually the counter notice, which puts your listing back within 10 to 14 business days under 17 U.S.C. 512(g)(2)(C) unless the filer sues, and the notice and counter notice, with the statutory elements marked covers what each one has to contain.
How we pulled the docket, and what the numbers cannot tell you
Population: every case published on the Copyright Claims Board's public docket at dockets.ccb.gov, docket numbers 22-CCB-0001 through 26-CCB-0562. n = 2,244 cases and 20,350 document rows, of which 1,987 cases were closed. Pulled September 2, 2026 at one request per second with an identified user agent. Earliest document date observed June 16, 2022, latest September 2, 2026. Refreshed quarterly.
Measurement: each closed case was assigned exactly one bucket by a first-match-wins rule over the set of document types on its docket. The buckets are presence tests, not the Board's dispositions. A final determination with any default-track document present is counted as a default; a final determination without one is counted as contested. Settlement, withdrawal and dismissal-request documents mark a case withdrawn or settled. An opt-out document marks an opt-out. Remaining dismissal orders are split three ways: no service-stage document of any kind on the docket, which is the bucket we describe as never served; a service stage reached with no proof of service, proof of waiver or response ever filed; and everything else after service. Time to disposition is the span from the first document to the last. Filing-year cohorts come from the docket-number prefix, which is the Board's own numbering and rolls over before the calendar year.
Known limits. Our buckets and the Office's dispositions are different measures, so the two columns in the table above are never merged or added, and the official counts are the ones to cite for the tribunal's own record. A separate re-parse of the raw pages by different code reproduced every figure on this page. Measured against the Office through March 2026, our never-served bucket runs 1.31 times its 787, our no-proof-of-service bucket 1.38 times its 272, our opt-out documents 1.12 times its 168, and our merged settlements and withdrawals 286 against its 309. Closed is the Board's own status label and covers every disposition, including administrative dismissal, so it never means a decision on the merits. 21 cases have no published documents at all. Opt-out counts depend on a published opt-out document, so an opt-out recorded only in a party list is invisible to us. Sealed matter does not appear on a public docket. The 2025 and 2026 cohorts are not published at all, because most of their claims were still open. And the docket cannot tell us what a claim was worth to the person who filed it, whether a settlement paid anything, or how many brands looked at this forum and chose the free notice instead.
No claimant or respondent name appears in the docket analysis on this page. Every docket figure is an aggregate.
Questions
How do I start a claim against someone who stole my product photos?
+
Register the photos with the Copyright Office first, or at least deliver a complete application, the deposit and the fee, because 17 U.S.C. 1505(a) makes that the gate. Then file the claim through eCCB, the Board's own filing system, at ccb.gov/access-a-claim, with the $40 first payment. Compliance review comes next, and a claim that clears it gets a notice directing you to serve the respondent within 90 days.
Can I take a copycat to regular small claims court instead?
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No. 28 U.S.C. 1338(a) gives the federal district courts jurisdiction over copyright cases exclusive of the courts of the states, so your county small claims court cannot hear a copyright claim at all. Your three options are a platform takedown notice, a claim at the Copyright Claims Board, or a federal lawsuit.
Is the Copyright Claims Board worth it for a brand owner?
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Only in a narrow case: a nameable US copycat, photos already registered or applied for, and money as the goal rather than the listing gone. Across 1,987 closed Copyright Claims Board cases through September 2, 2026, Knockoff found that 50.9% closed with no service-stage document on the docket, meaning the claim was never served (n=1,011). Counting differently, the Copyright Office put 787 of 1,920 claims filed through March 2026, 41.0%, in its own dismissed-after-compliance-review bucket.
What happens if the seller opts out?
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The proceeding is dismissed without prejudice and you are back where you started. 17 U.S.C. 1506(i) gives a respondent 60 days beginning on the date of service to opt out, and 37 C.F.R. 223.1(a) makes the dismissal automatic. In Knockoff's docket pull, an opt-out document appears in 200 of 2,244 cases, 8.9%, as of September 2, 2026.
How do I look up a Copyright Claims Board case?
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Every case is public at dockets.ccb.gov, searchable by docket number, party name or filing date, with the documents attached to each case. Docket numbers look like 22-CCB-0045, where the first two digits are the filing year. That docket is the source of every Knockoff figure on this page.
Can a copycat get in trouble for filing a fake takedown against me?
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Yes. A knowing material misrepresentation in a takedown notice is actionable under 17 U.S.C. 512(f), and a 512(f) misrepresentation claim is one of the three claim types the Copyright Claims Board hears under 17 U.S.C. 1504(c). Separately, 17 U.S.C. 1506(y)(2) lets the Board award costs and fees up to $5,000 against a party who pursued a claim in bad faith, or costs up to $2,500 against an unrepresented party.
What stops someone filing claims at the Copyright Claims Board over and over?
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17 U.S.C. 1506(y)(3) bars a party with more than one bad-faith finding inside 12 months from starting new claims for a year. 37 C.F.R. 233.2(a) caps volume separately: no more than 30 proceedings in any 12-month period for a claimant counted with its parents, subsidiaries and affiliates, 40 for a sole practitioner and 80 for a law firm.
Does the Copyright Claims Board make the copycat take the listing down?
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No, and this is the most important limit for a brand owner. The Copyright Claims Board handbook says the Board "cannot order a respondent to cease the complained of activity unless the respondent agrees to such an order if found liable." Removal comes from a takedown notice sent to the platform.
What does a Copyright Claims Board claim cost in total?
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$40 to file, plus $60 when the case reaches its active phase, so $100 in Board fees. Registration is separate: $45 for a single work by a single author, $65 for a standard electronic application, or $55 for a group of up to 750 published or unpublished photographs, plus a $50 expedited registration route built for small claims. Those are the fees in 37 C.F.R. 201.3, read September 2, 2026.
Cite this page
Pigford, Josh. "Copyright Claims Board: what a $100 claim against a copycat buys, and what happens to it." Knockoff, published September 2, 2026. https://knockoff.co/guides/copyright-claims-board
Sources and dates
Every source below was read on September 2, 2026.
- 17 U.S.C. 1504: voluntary at (a), three-year limit and federal tolling at (b), claim types at (c), foreign-respondent exclusion at (d)(4), damages and the $15,000, $7,500 and $30,000 caps at (e).
- 17 U.S.C. 1505: the registration gate, abeyance and dismissal on refusal.
- 17 U.S.C. 1506: two free amendments at (f)(1)(B), 90-day service and the agent directory at (g), the Article III and jury waiver at (h)(1), the 60-day opt-out at (i), discovery at (n), written testimony at (o), default at (u), reconsideration at (w), Register review at (x), bad-faith fees and the 12-month bar at (y).
- 17 U.S.C. 1507: preclusion and the precedent bar. 17 U.S.C. 1508: enforcement in district court, the expense shift, and the narrow challenge at (c).
- 17 U.S.C. 411(a) for registration before a federal suit and 17 U.S.C. 502 for injunctions, both in the comparison table.
- 17 U.S.C. 512: misrepresentation at (f), and the 10 to 14 business day putback window at (g)(2)(C).
- 28 U.S.C. 1338(a): copyright jurisdiction exclusive of the state courts. The federal $405 is the $350 fee in 28 U.S.C. 1914(a) plus the $55 administrative fee in the district court miscellaneous fee schedule.
- eCFR: 37 C.F.R. 201.3 for $40, $60, the $300 Register review fee and registration at $45, $65, $55 and the $50 expedited small-claims route; 223.1 for opt-out; 226.1 for the $5,000 track; 233.2 for the filing caps. The 750-photograph group cap is 37 C.F.R. 202.4(h)(2).
- ccb.gov: the statistics sheet updated March 2026, covering June 2022 through March 2026, for 1,920 claims and the counts 787, 272, 168, 154, 155, 25 and 22; the Handbook for the stage sequence and the quotation that the Board cannot order a respondent to cease. Also start or access a claim, the service handbook for the 90-day window, the 7-day proof deadline and the no-subpoenas statement, and the Designated Service Agent Directory, which returned Amazon.com Services LLC and Google LLC and no results for Etsy, Shopify or Meta.
- CASE Act Report, February 2026, data as of December 31, 2025: claim types 1,503, 301 and 67; 66.6% self-represented; 36% pictorial, graphic, and sculptural; 43% compliant and 63% receiving a noncompliance order or dismissed as unsuitable; 518, 615 and 438 day averages; 43 determinations; awards in nearly 72% of them at $3,598.58 average, $750 low, $11,000 high, $2,392.17 contested and $4,360.53 default; and the recommendation to cut two amendments to one. Also the FY2025 Annual Report.
- Dockets 22-CCB-0137 and 22-CCB-0056, read on dockets.ccb.gov. Independent analysis: Fortney and Hansen, "Assessing the Copyright Claims Board After Two Years," 72 J. Copyright Soc'y 452 (2024), covering 880 claims through mid-June 2024.
The AIPLA figure of more than $275,000 for an average federal copyright suit is reported in the Fortney and Hansen article citing the AIPLA 2021 Economic Survey. We could not read the survey directly, so it is printed here as reported rather than confirmed. The three statistical sources use different as-of dates and different denominators, which is why no figure on this page mixes them inside one sentence. Our own figures come from the docket pull described above, and the 67.1% combined figure is our arithmetic on two of our own rows.
Knockoff sells brand protection software and is not a neutral party. Knockoff is not a law firm, does not file claims for anyone, and this page is general information rather than legal advice. Fees, rules and Board guidance change, so read the source before you rely on a figure here.
