Guide
How to copyright your product photos
Written September 1, 2026 by Josh Pigford
You already own the copyright in every product photograph you have taken. It exists from the shutter click, with no form, no fee and no wait, and it is the right that takes a stolen listing down. Nothing on this page is required before you send a takedown notice. If a copy is live right now, go send one and come back afterwards.
Registration is the other lane. It is a separate act, it costs money, and what you buy with it is the ability to sue, the ability to ask for damages that do not require you to prove a loss, and access to a small-claims tribunal that is cheap enough for a one-person brand to use. The catch is the timing: it has to be done before a copycat shows up, or inside a three-month window after you first publish. This page is about how to route a catalog of product photographs through that system for three figures rather than five.
The short version
- Copyright is automatic. Registration is optional, and takedown notices never require it.
- A group of up to 750 photographs by one author registers for $55, filed online. That is about 7 cents a photograph.
- Knockoff measured 19 direct-to-consumer Shopify catalogs in September 2026, and the median catalog holds 1,441 product photographs. That is two group applications, $110. Filed one at a time it is $64,845 at the single-application rate, and $93,665 at the standard rate that applies to photographs shot in-house as works made for hire.
- Register before the copying starts, or within three months of first publication, or section 412 closes the door on statutory damages and attorney's fees for that copying.
- The certificate takes months, but 17 U.S.C. 410(d) dates the registration to the day the Office received the application, deposit and fee.
- Deposits go up as JPEG, GIF or TIFF. Shopify serves WebP, so a catalog export usually needs converting before you file.
The takedown lane and the registration lane
People search for "how to copyright my photos" because they found a copy and assume there is a filing standing between them and doing something about it. There is not. The Copyright Office's own guidance for photographers says your photograph is protected as soon as it is fixed, and that registration is voluntary.
The takedown lane runs on ownership alone. The six elements a notice has to contain are set out in 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A), and a registration number is not among them. Every marketplace copyright form is those six fields with different labels. If that is the lane you need today, the notice field by field is the wording, the takedown notice generator fills it in, and the reporting route for each platform is where to send it. When the copy is a whole cloned storefront rather than a listing, start with the running order for the day you find one, and the Shopify report routes if it is hosted where yours is.
The registration lane runs on paperwork and a clock. It is worth understanding as an insurance decision made in advance rather than a remedy you reach for after the fact, because almost everything valuable about it depends on having filed before the trouble arrived.
What registration actually buys
Four things, and one of them is a deadline rather than a benefit.
- The right to file suit at all. The Supreme Court settled the timing in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, 586 U.S. 296 (2019): "Registration occurs, and a copyright claimant may commence an infringement suit, when the Copyright Office registers a copyright." An application in the queue is not enough for federal court. The same opinion carries the compensating point, that once registered an owner can recover "for infringement that occurred both before and after registration".
- Statutory damages, if you were early. 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(1) lets a court award between $750 and $30,000 per work as it considers just, with no proof of what the copying cost you, and 504(c)(2) raises the ceiling to $150,000 where the copying was willful. Section 505 makes attorney's fees available at the court's discretion. Both of those disappear under section 412 unless the registration came first.
- The section 412 clock, which is the whole game. No statutory damages and no attorney's fees for copying of an unpublished work that started before the effective date of registration, and none for copying that started after first publication and before registration, unless registration was made within three months after first publication. Read plainly: register before you publish, or inside three months of publishing. Miss both and you are left with actual damages and the copycat's profits under 504(b), which you have to prove.
- A presumption, and a cheap forum. Under 17 U.S.C. 410(c) a certificate obtained within five years of first publication is prima facie evidence of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in it. And registration is the gate to the Copyright Claims Board, the small-claims tribunal inside the Copyright Office, which costs $40 to file plus a further $60 if the case reaches its active phase. The Board accepts a claim where you have submitted an application before or at the same time as filing, so a pending application is enough there.
The Board's damages are capped: $15,000 per infringed work and $30,000 per proceeding for a work registered in time, and $7,500 per work and $15,000 per proceeding for a work that was not. Attorney's fees are capped at $5,000, or $2,500 for an unrepresented party. It is a small room, on purpose, and it is the only room in the copyright system built at the scale of a single stolen product photograph.
Which of the four applications
The choice is two questions deep rather than one. How many photographs, then, if it is many, have they been published. Get it wrong and you either overpay by a factor of hundreds or get the claim refused.
One photograph, one author, not made for hire
Single application, $45
One photograph, any other case
Standard application, $65
Many photographs, already published
Group of published photographs, $55
Many photographs, not yet published
Group of unpublished photographs, $55
Both group applications cap at 750 photographs by the same author, and the published group takes one calendar year of first publication per application. Published and unpublished photographs cannot share a group. Fees current as of September 2026.
| Application | Fee | What it covers | Conditions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single application | $45 | One work, published or unpublished | One author, one claimant, and the work was not made for hire |
| Standard application | $65 | One work in any other case | Multiple authors, a work made for hire, or anything else outside the single application |
| Group of published photographs (GRPPH) | $55 | Up to 750 published photographs in one claim | Same author, same claimant, a group title, all first published in the same calendar year, online filing only |
| Group of unpublished photographs (GRUPH) | $55 | Up to 750 unpublished photographs in one claim | Same author, same claimant, a group title, no published photographs in the batch, online filing only |
One correction is worth printing, because the fee number is where the ranking pages go wrong. A top-ranking guide on this topic prints $85 for a group of unpublished photographs. The Copyright Office fee schedule says $55. The $85 line is group registration of unpublished works, a different program, and not the photographs program at all. If you have budgeted from an $85 figure, you have budgeted for the wrong claim.
Work made for hire does not exclude you from the group. The Office's guidance says photographs made for hire can be registered in a group as long as the same employer is named as the author for all of them, which for a brand that shoots in-house is usually one line on the form.
The reason the group is worth having is in the regulation rather than the fee. Under 37 CFR 202.4(r), each photograph in a registered group is registered as a separate work and is not considered a compilation, which matters because 504(c)(1) counts all parts of a compilation as one work for damages purposes. The Copyright Office's own view when it built the program was that the copyright owner "should be entitled" to statutory damages for each photograph in the group. That is the Office's reading, not a court's, and a court decides how many works are in front of it. Nobody should file 750 photographs expecting 750 awards.
The catalog math
A product catalog is the ideal shape for a group registration, and the guides on this subject are written for wedding photographers rather than for stores. So we counted. On September 1, 2026 we read the public product catalogs of 19 direct-to-consumer Shopify stores, paging each store's products.json to exhaustion or to 2,000 products, whichever came first.
$110
2 group applications, 1,441 photographs
$64,845
1,441 single applications, one photograph each
Both bars share one zero-based scale, so the $110 bar is 1.3 units of 768 and is drawn as the hairline it is. The one-at-a-time bar is drawn at the $45 single-application rate, which is the lower bound; at the $65 standard rate that applies when the photographs were shot in-house as works made for hire, the same 1,441 photographs cost $93,665. Median of 19 direct-to-consumer Shopify catalogs measured September 1, 2026. Fees current as of September 2026.
Knockoff measured 19 direct-to-consumer Shopify catalogs in September 2026: the median store carried 293 products, and the median catalog held 1,441 product photographs. Across the whole sample there are 7.3 photographs for every product. The mean is larger and less useful, at 586 products and 4,274 photographs, because a handful of catalogs are very deep: one home-goods brand alone showed 15,671 photographs across 470 products. Only 7 of the 19 catalogs, 37 percent of the sample, would fit under the 750-photograph cap in a single application.
Run the fee arithmetic on the median store. 1,441 photographs is two group applications, so $110. Filed one at a time that is $64,845 at the single-application rate, and $93,665 at the $65 standard rate that applies when the photographs were shot in-house as works made for hire. Across the whole sample, the 81,204 photographs we counted are 116 group applications and $6,380, against $3,654,180 filed one work at a time at the single-application rate, a factor of 573.
Read the count as an upper bound rather than a photo inventory. The images array in a store's products.json includes everything attached to a product, so size charts, swatch tiles and the same file repeated across variants all land in it. The direction is what matters: even at half these numbers, the group is the only sane route and the per-application route is not a route at all.
Sample of 19 stores, measured September 1, 2026, refreshed annually. We attempted 24 and five failed, four to bot protection and one to a TLS error, so the sample skews towards stores that leave their catalog endpoint open. If you want the shape of your own catalog rather than the median, a scan reads your storefront's products the same way.
Published or unpublished, and why nobody will tell you
You have to answer this to pick a group, and there is no clean answer for a product listing. Anyone who gives you one is guessing.
Here is what the Copyright Office does say. Putting a photograph online is not necessarily publication. Publicly displaying a work is not publication on its own either. The hinge is distribution: whether copies were distributed, or offered for distribution to a group of people for the purpose of further distribution or public display. So the questions the Office points at are whether the site authorizes visitors to retain a copy, what the terms of use say about downloading, and whether there is an implied licence to take the file.
Some cases are easy. If your photographs went into a printed catalog, onto packaging, or to a retailer or press list as files they could use, tangible copies were distributed and the photographs are published. A photograph sitting on a product page with nothing downloadable about it is where the argument lives, and the Office has not resolved it. Its own position is that it generally lets the applicant decide whether a work is published, which is the Office telling you it will not settle this for you.
Two consequences worth acting on. First, the Office's guidance for photographers strongly encourages you to register your photographs before they are published, and its practice manual notes that registering an unpublished work before an infringement happens preserves the statutory damages route. That is the same advice section 412 gives, from a different direction: the shoot is done, the photos are on a drive, register them there before anything goes live and you have sidestepped the whole question along with the three-month window. Second, if you decide a batch is published, the calendar-year rule applies, so a published group cannot span two years.
If your catalog is already live and you have to characterize old photographs, this is a question for a lawyer, not for a page on a vendor's website. Nobody here is one.
Who owns the photographs you paid for
Check this before you file anything, because a group application names one author and one claimant and getting either wrong is a defect in the record.
Section 201(a) puts initial ownership in the author of the work, and the Copyright Office's photography guidance says the author is the person who shoots the photograph. Section 201(b) carves out the work made for hire, where the employer or commissioning party counts as the author. Employees are the straightforward half: photographs taken by your staff within the scope of their employment are the company's as works made for hire, and they can go into a group with the company named as author.
Freelancers are where merchants get caught. A commissioned work qualifies as a work made for hire only if it fits one of nine categories the Copyright Office lists, and only if there is a signed written agreement saying so. The Office's list is: a contribution to a collective work, a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, and an atlas. Photographs are not on that list. The Office publishes the list rather than a conclusion, so treat a standalone commissioned product shoot as something you should have an assignment for.
Whether the photographer is an employee at all is not decided by what the invoice says. In Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989), the Supreme Court held that the question turns on the general common law of agency, considering "the hiring party's right to control the manner and means by which the product is accomplished", and it treated the sculptor in that case as an independent contractor despite close direction from the party who commissioned the work. A freelance photographer who brings their own gear, sets their own hours and invoices you is that shape.
The fix is a written assignment of copyright, signed by the photographer, naming the shoot. Paid, delivered and used is not the same as owned, and the day you find out otherwise is usually the day you were about to sue somebody. This is the copyright equivalent of the mistake covered in the patent routes for a copied product, where the selling history that makes a product worth copying is what closes the filing window.
Filing a group of product photographs, step by step
Group applications for photographs have to be filed electronically, through the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) system at eco.copyright.gov. Paper is allowed for some claim types and it delays everything, so treat online as the only route here.
- 1. Split the batch by author, by claimant and by publication status. Each group is one application in eCO. One group holds photographs by one author, claimed by one owner. Published and unpublished cannot mix. If a shoot was split across a staff photographer and a freelancer, that is two groups, or one group and an assignment to sort out first.
- 2. Split a published batch by calendar year. Every photograph in a published group has to have been first published in the same calendar year. The filing system rejects a group spanning two years at the point of filing rather than months later, which is the one refusal you get told about quickly.
- 3. Cap each group at 750 photographs. That is the regulation and the system enforces it. A 1,441-photograph catalog is two applications at $55 each.
- 4. Convert the files. The Office lists JPEG, GIF and TIFF as the acceptable formats for a photograph deposit. WebP is not on the list, and Shopify serves WebP to most browsers, so a catalog export usually arrives in a format the Office will not take. HEIC off an iPhone and PNG are not on the list either. Batch-convert to JPEG before you build the upload.
- 5. Give the group a title, and decide which individual titles you want in the public record. Photograph titles typed into the application appear in the public record and are searchable there, while titles that exist only in your uploaded list do not. If you want a copycat's lawyer to be able to find your registration by product name, type the titles in. The title field caps at 1,995 characters per screen.
- 6. Build the numbered list. The Office wants a sequentially numbered list of the photographs, giving the title and the file name for each one, and for a published group the month and year of publication as well. An unpublished group needs no dates. Save it as an .xls or .pdf, and name the file so it carries the group title and the case number.
- 7. Upload the photographs as a zip. A zip is the preferred container, and each upload is capped at 500MB, so a large group is several uploads. This is the slow step, and it is worth doing on a wired connection rather than at an airport.
- 8. Type the list's file name on the certification screen. The list is identified by name at certification, and this is the field applicants skip. Then certify and pay.
A caution about what the group buys before you assume it covers everything. The Office states that it will not register photographs that lack a sufficient amount of creative expression, and its photography guidance describes copyrightability in terms of the artistic choices behind the shot: lighting, angle, arrangement, timing. That is not a rule that plain white-background product shots fail, and no such rule is published. It is a reason not to treat every file in an export as automatically registrable, and a reason to lead a group with the photographs you actually art-directed.
How long it takes, and why the wait matters less than it reads
For claims closed between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, the Copyright Office reports an average of 4.1 months across all claims. Split by what happened to the claim, electronic filings that needed no correspondence averaged 3.6 months in a range of 2 to 5.3, and filings that drew correspondence from an examiner averaged 5.0 months in a range of 1.6 to 8.3. About 27 percent of claims get correspondence, so between a quarter and a third of applications take the longer path. The Office notes that the government shutdown in October and November 2025 lengthened these figures and says the effect should be temporary.
Here is the part that changes how the wait feels. Under 17 U.S.C. 410(d), the effective date of a registration is the day the Copyright Office received an acceptable application, deposit and fee, not the day it issued the certificate. The section 412 clock stops when you file. Four months of examination does not cost you four months of exposure, and a copy that goes live in month two is a copy that started after your effective date.
If you need the certificate faster, special handling exists at $800 on top of the filing fee, and it is priced for a case that already exists rather than for routine catalog work. The Copyright Claims Board has its own cheaper expedite: if you have a claim there and your registration is still pending, expedited registration through that route is $50 per work.
When registering is not worth doing
Registration is cheap at $110, but what it buys is a legal option, and options are only worth what you would ever exercise them for. Here is the other side.
- If your problem is listings, registration changes nothing about today. The takedown route needs no registration, and it is the route that removes a live copy. A counter notice from the seller can put the material back after a window measured in 10 to 14 business days from the platform's receipt of the counter notice, and registration does not change that either. The lever there is deciding whether to escalate, which is where registration matters, and only then.
- The small-claims forum is real. Its own numbers show how few claims reach a determination. The Copyright Claims Board publishes those numbers, covering the period from June 2022 through March 2026: 1,920 claims filed, 168 respondents opted out, 787 claims dismissed after compliance review, 272 dismissed for lack of valid proof of service, 154 withdrawn, 155 settlements including 9 after dismissal, 25 contested final determinations and 22 defaults. Those are raw counts from the Board's own statistics file and nothing more should be read into them, but the shape is worth seeing before you plan around the Board as an enforcement mechanism.
- Awards are not the headline number. The reporting on Board determinations describes modest outcomes. In one case covered in November 2024, McDermott v. Kalita Mukul Creative in the Southern District of New York, the court awarded $940 and no attorney's fees against a request for more than $120,000 in fees, writing that "If anything, the record points to unreasonable conduct by Plaintiff." That is a federal case rather than a Board proceeding, the registration position in it is not something we verified, and it is one case. It is a useful corrective to the arithmetic that starts at $750 a photograph.
- If the copycat is overseas, the levers registration unlocks rarely reach. Registration is a US filing, and what it opens is a US lawsuit and the Copyright Claims Board. Both need a respondent a US forum can reach and a judgment worth collecting. Against a seller in another country the practical remedy stays the takedown notice, which needs no registration, and watching for the relist.
- If nobody at your company will ever pursue this, do not buy the option. Registration is worth it if you would use it. For a lot of brands the honest answer is that the takedown route plus watching for the relist is the whole enforcement program, and $110 a year is a rounding error against being clear-eyed about that.
Copyright is also only one of the rights a copied brand holds. If the copy is of your name rather than your pictures, that is trademark, and what a trademark actually costs to file is the equivalent arithmetic on that side. The map of which right covers which asset is in the definition of brand protection for a store owner.
Where Knockoff fits
Knockoff is what we build, so read this knowing that. We do not file copyright registrations and nothing on this page is a service we sell. What we do is the half that happens after the paperwork: connect a Shopify store by domain alone and your catalog becomes the reference set, your product photos get watched across marketplaces and the open web, and a match counts only when your photograph turns up in the seller's own listing gallery. Each confirmed match arrives as a case with the archived page, a timestamped screenshot, your original beside theirs, and the notice already written for the route it belongs on. You approve it, a person here reads the notice, and you submit it through the platform's own form. See what a case holds before you approve it, or check your own catalog for stolen photos.
The limits, because they belong on a page like this one. Shopify stores only today, one store per company. US trademark watch only. Detection of a copied product look is advisory and never becomes a filing on its own. Nobody here is a lawyer, and nobody in this category controls what a platform decides, so read any promise of removals as a sales line. The plans are priced in the open, monthly, with no contract.
Questions
How much does it cost to copyright a photo? +
Nothing, if you mean copyright itself. A photograph is protected from the moment it is taken and fixed in a file, with no fee and no filing. If you mean registering it with the US Copyright Office, the electronic fees current as of September 2026 are $45 for a single application, which covers one work by one author that was not made for hire, and $65 for a standard application. A group of up to 750 photographs by the same author is $55, whether the group is published or unpublished, and those group options must be filed online. At 750 photographs the group fee works out to about 7 cents each, and the Copyright Office made the same arithmetic itself when it created the program, writing that a photographer would pay "$0.07 to register each work". The Office published a proposed fee increase on March 20, 2026, and comments closed on May 4, 2026, so check the fee schedule before you file rather than trusting any figure on any page, including this one.
Can I copyright my own product photos? +
If you took them, you already hold the copyright, and you can register them. If somebody else took them, the answer turns on paperwork rather than on who paid. Section 201 puts initial ownership in the author, and the Copyright Office's own guidance says the author of a photograph is the person who shoots it. An employee's photographs taken within the scope of employment belong to the company as a work made for hire. A freelancer's do not, unless the work fits one of the nine categories the Office lists for commissioned works made for hire and there is a signed written agreement saying so. Photographs are not among those nine categories. The practical fix is a written assignment of copyright signed by the photographer, and it is far easier to get before the invoice is paid than two years afterwards.
How do I protect my product pictures from being copied? +
You cannot stop a copy, and no watermark, right-click block or hotlink rule survives a screenshot. What you can do is shorten the time between the copy going live and you knowing about it, and have the paperwork ready when it does. A takedown notice needs no registration, so that lever is available today on every major platform. Registration is the lever behind it: register before the copying starts, or within three months of first publishing the photographs, and statutory damages and attorney's fees stay on the table under section 412. Miss both windows and you are limited to proving what the copying actually cost you, which is expensive to do and often worth less than the effort.
Do I need a copyright registration to send a takedown notice? +
No. The six elements a takedown notice must contain are listed in 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A), and a registration number is not one of them. Platform copyright forms ask for a link to your original work, page-level links to the copies, your contact details, a good-faith statement and a signature under penalty of perjury. Registration belongs to the lawsuit lane, not the notice lane, and treating the two as one is the mistake that keeps merchants from acting for months.
How long does copyright registration take? +
For claims closed between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, the Copyright Office reports an average of 4.1 months across all claims. Electronic filings that needed no correspondence averaged 3.6 months, in a range of 2 to 5.3 months. Filings that did draw correspondence averaged 5.0 months, in a range of 1.6 to 8.3 months, and the Office reports that about 27 percent of claims get correspondence. The Office also notes that the government shutdown in October and November 2025 lengthened those figures and says the effect should be temporary. The wait costs you less than it looks like it does, because 17 U.S.C. 410(d) sets the effective date of registration to the day the Office received an acceptable application, deposit and fee, not the day the certificate arrives. Expedited handling exists for $800 on top of the filing fee.
Can I register a thousand product photos in one application? +
Not in one. A group application takes up to 750 photographs, so 1,000 photographs is two applications. Every photograph in a group has to share one author and one copyright claimant, the group needs a title, and published and unpublished photographs cannot be mixed in the same claim. A group of published photographs also has to be photographs first published in the same calendar year, and the electronic system rejects a batch that spans two years at filing rather than months later. Under 37 CFR 202.4(r) each photograph in a registered group is registered as a separate work and is not treated as a compilation for the purposes of the statutory damages section, which is the reason the group is worth filing at all.
How long does copyright in a product photograph last? +
For a photograph created on or after January 1, 1978, 17 U.S.C. 302(a) runs the term for the life of the author plus 70 years. Section 302(c) sets a different term for a work made for hire, which is 95 years from the year of first publication or 120 years from the year of creation, whichever expires first. So photographs your staff shot for the company run on the 95-or-120-year clock, while photographs a freelancer shot and later assigned to you are still measured from that photographer's life, because an assignment moves the ownership and not the term.
Do I need a copyright notice or a watermark on my product photos? +
No. The Copyright Office's Circular 3 says copyright notice is optional for works published on or after March 1, 1989, and that a notice has never been required for unpublished works. There is still a reason to use one, because the Office notes that works first published after that date may need the statutory notice formalities to keep a defendant from raising an innocent infringement defense. A watermark is not a legal requirement at any point, and it stops nobody from taking the file.
Does mailing a copy of my photos to myself protect them? +
No. The Copyright Office answers this one directly in its general FAQ: the practice of sending a copy of your own work to yourself is sometimes called a poor man's copyright, and "There is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration." Your copyright already exists without the envelope, and the envelope buys none of what a registration buys.
Cite this page
Pigford, Josh. "How to copyright your product photos." Knockoff, published September 1, 2026. https://knockoff.co/guides/how-to-copyright-product-photos
Sources and dates
Copyright Office publications, read September 1, 2026: Circular 42, Copyright Registration of Photographs (revised March 2021) for automatic protection, the person who shoots the photograph as author, the group conditions, works made for hire in a group, the artistic-choices description of copyrightability, and the recommendation to register before publishing; Circular 4, Copyright Office Fees (revised November 2024) for the application names and the $800 special handling fee; the fee schedule for $45, $65 and $55, which prints no effective date, hence "current as of September 2026"; Circular 30, Works Made for Hire (revised August 2024) for the nine commissioned categories and the written-agreement requirement; Circular 66, Copyright Registration of Websites and Website Content (revised March 2021) for online publication; Circular 3, Copyright Notice for notice being optional on works published on or after March 1, 1989 and never required for unpublished works, and for the innocent-infringement point; the Office's general FAQ for the "poor man's copyright" answer; Compendium chapter 1100 for the deposit and list requirements, the calendar-year rejection at filing, and the unpublished-registration point; and the Office's processing-times figures for claims closed October 1, 2025 through March 31, 2026, including the shutdown note. The proposed fee increase was published in the Federal Register on March 20, 2026, with comments closed May 4, 2026 and no new fees in effect.
Law: 37 CFR 202.4 for the group requirements at (h) and (i), the refusal and cancellation provisions, and the separate-work treatment at (r), current through the amendment of August 13, 2026; 17 U.S.C. 201, 302 for the life-plus-70 and work-made-for-hire terms, 410, 412, 504, 505 and 512; Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, 586 U.S. 296 (2019), quoted from the bound volume; and Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989). The Copyright Office's "should be entitled" reading of per-photograph statutory damages is from its 2018 Federal Register notice creating the group photographs programs, 83 FR 2542, which is also where the seven-cents-per-work arithmetic comes from. It is the Office's position, not a holding.
Copyright Claims Board: the Board's handbook chapter on filing a claim for the $40 filing fee and the further $60 due if a proceeding enters its active phase, and for the pending-application rule; the damages chapter (revised January 2, 2024) for the $15,000 and $30,000 caps on a timely registered work, the $7,500 and $15,000 caps where a work was not timely registered, and the fee caps; and the Board's statistics file, updated March 2026 and covering 06/2022 to 03/2026, for the raw counts quoted above. The McDermott figures are from reporting published November 19, 2024; we did not verify the registration position in that case, which is why nothing here turns on it.
Census: 19 direct-to-consumer Shopify catalogs read on September 1, 2026 through each store's public products.json, paged to exhaustion with a cap of 2,000 products per store. 24 stores were attempted and 5 failed, four to bot protection and one to a TLS error, so the sample skews to stores that leave the endpoint open. The photograph count is the length of each product's images array, which is an upper bound: it can include size charts and swatch tiles and can repeat one file across variants. Median 293 products and 1,441 photographs, mean 586 and 4,274, 7 of 19 under the 750 cap, 81,204 photographs in total. Refreshed annually.
Knockoff sells brand protection software and is not a neutral party. Knockoff is not a law firm, does not file copyright registrations, and this page is general information rather than legal advice. Fees, forms and processing times change, so read the source before you rely on a figure here.
