The Copyright Claims Board: a $100 forum the other side is allowed to walk out of

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 created the Board and it began accepting claims in June 2022. It is a real tribunal: three Copyright Claims Officers, binding determinations, enforceable in a district court. What it is not is compulsory, and almost everything that goes wrong for claimants there follows from that single fact.

What it costs, and why the price is the whole argument

The Copyright Office splits the filing fee in two. $40 is due when the claim is filed. $60 more is due only if the opt-out period ends and nobody has opted out. If every respondent opts out, the second payment is never owed. So the worst realistic outcome of trying the CCB and failing is that you are out forty dollars and about three months.

Set that against the alternative. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1914(a) the clerk of a district court must collect a $350 filing fee to institute a civil action, and the Judicial Conference adds a $55 administrative fee on top. That $405 is the cheapest thing about a federal copyright case; it buys you the docket number and nothing else. Two thirds of CCB claimants are self-represented individuals, which is not a statistic any federal copyright docket produces.

The rest of the design follows the price. Hearings are held by video. Discovery is limited to written questions and document requests, with no depositions and rarely if ever an expert. Each side bears its own costs and fees, except that a party acting in bad faith can be ordered to pay the other side's — capped at $5,000, or $2,500 against a self-represented party.

The caps are hard, and the lower one catches late registration

Section 1504(e)(1)(D) is absolute: a party may not seek or recover more than $30,000 in total in a single proceeding, exclusive of any bad-faith fee award. That is per proceeding, not per claim and not per work, and it applies however many claims are packed in. Above it, the CCB is simply the wrong forum, and filing there anyway is a decision to abandon the excess.

The per-work statutory damages cap has two settings, and the second one is where the registration date you chose years ago comes back. Where the work was timely registered under section 412, statutory damages may not exceed $15,000 per work. Where it was not, the ceiling drops to $7,500 per work and $15,000 for the whole proceeding. The Board is also forbidden from finding, or even considering, that an infringement was wilful — the multiplier that makes federal statutory damages frightening does not exist here.

A claimant seeking $5,000 or less may ask for the smaller claims track: one officer, a shorter procedure, and a determination with exactly the same effect. Just under half of all claims filed have used it.

The opt-out is the whole risk

Section 1506(i) gives a properly served respondent 60 days, beginning on the date of service, to notify the Board that they are opting out. There is no form of words to defeat, no reason required, and no fee. It takes a few minutes on eCCB, and the Board sends a second notice during the window reminding the respondent that the option exists and supplying the keycode again. A late opt-out is invalid, but a timely one ends the proceeding outright: the claim is dismissed without prejudice.

Be realistic about who opts out. A represented company, or one that has designated a service agent, will treat the opt-out as a free option and take it. Libraries and archives that qualify under section 108 can opt out of every CCB proceeding in advance, permanently, and the Office publishes the list — check it before paying to file against one. The claimants who get value from the CCB are overwhelmingly those suing a party who is not going to consult a lawyer about a $2,000 photograph.

The Office publishes its own dispositions, and they are the most honest thing on the subject. Cumulatively from June 2022 to March 2026, against 1,920 claims filed:

Forty-seven determinations in nearly four years is the number to sit with, and roughly half of those were defaults. The realistic output of a CCB claim is a settlement, a withdrawal, or a dismissal — most often a dismissal caused by the claimant's own paperwork rather than by the respondent. That is not an argument against using it. It is an argument for treating the filing as a serious document rather than a web form.

Who cannot be brought before the CCB at all

The jurisdictional exclusions in section 1504(d) knock out more real disputes than the damages cap does, and they are rarely mentioned.

• Anyone residing outside the United States, unless they started the proceeding themselves — and service may only be effected inside the United States. The overseas site scraping your images is out of reach here.
• Federal and state government entities. Excluded outright.
• Anything already before a court — finally adjudicated or currently pending — unless that court stays it to let the CCB hear it.
• A host, until you have sent a takedown notice. A claim against an online service provider for storing or linking to material is non-compliant unless the claimant affirms they already sent a section 512 notice and it was not acted on expeditiously.

That last one is a sequencing rule with teeth, and it is a large part of why 787 claims died at compliance review. The takedown comes first; the CCB claim is for what the takedown did not fix.

You can file before registration issues. You cannot win before it does.

Section 1505 relaxes the federal rule rather than removing it. A claim may be asserted once the owner has delivered a completed application, deposit and fee to the Copyright Office, provided registration has either issued or not been refused. So the application may still be in the queue on the day you file — which is not true of a federal suit.

What is deferred is the determination, not the requirement. No determination may issue until the certificate has been granted, submitted to the Board and made available to the other parties to address. A case that reaches that point with the application still pending is held in abeyance, and after a year the Board may dismiss it without prejudice on thirty days' notice; a refusal dismisses it without prejudice too. A claimant with a live proceeding can request small claims expedited registration through eCCB for $50 per work.

The two claims almost nobody files

The Board hears three things, and public attention has gone entirely to the first. Section 1504(c) also permits a claim for a declaration of non-infringement — a ruling that what you are doing does not infringe — and a claim under section 512(f) for misrepresentation in a takedown notice or counter-notice.

Both are useful and both are otherwise unaffordable. If a competitor has had your listing pulled with a takedown notice they had no basis to send, section 512(f) is the remedy — and outside the CCB that means a federal lawsuit over a listing. If someone is sending letters about a use you believe is fair, a declaration claim puts it in front of three copyright specialists for $100 rather than leaving it hanging. The $30,000 cap applies to both.

Filing, in the order the rules force

1. 1

   Check the respondent is one the Board can reach

   They must reside in the United States, not be a government entity, and not sit on the libraries and archives opt-out list. If the target is a platform rather than the poster, send the section 512 notice first — a claim without that affirmation fails compliance review.

2. 2

   Get the registration application in

   Deliver a completed application, deposit and fee to the Copyright Office before or simultaneously with the claim. The certificate can come later; the application cannot.

3. 3

   File the claim on eCCB and pay $40

   Identify the work, the infringing activity, the damages sought and whether you want the smaller claims track. There is no paper route for the claim itself.

4. 4

   Clear compliance review

   A Copyright Claims Attorney reads it. If it is deficient you get 30 days to amend at no extra fee, then one further 30-day chance. Miss the second and the proceeding is dismissed.

5. 5

   Serve the notice and claim, and file proof within 90 days

   Once the Board tells you to proceed, you have 90 days to file proof of service. Personal service, a designated service agent or a returned waiver of personal service all work.

6. 6

   Wait out the 60-day opt-out period

   The clock runs from the date of service, not from filing. Nothing you do during it changes the decision.

7. 7

   Pay the $60 second payment and go active

   Owed only if no respondent opted out. The Board issues a schedule, and the proceeding runs through response, limited discovery, a settlement window and written testimony.

Winning is not the same as being paid

A CCB determination is not self-executing. If the losing party does not pay, section 1508(a) requires the winner to apply to a district court within one year for an order confirming the award and reducing it to judgment, and the court must grant it unless the determination has been vacated. There is compensation for the trouble: the court must impose the reasonable expenses of obtaining that order, including attorney's fees, on the party who failed to pay.

Review runs the other way and is deliberately narrow. A party may ask the Board to reconsider for a clear error of law or fact material to the outcome, then ask the Register of Copyrights — for a $300 fee — to decide whether the Board abused its discretion in refusing. A district court may vacate, modify or correct a determination only for fraud, corruption, misrepresentation or misconduct; where the Board exceeded its authority or failed to determine the subject matter; or, on a default, for excusable neglect. There is no appeal on the merits at all.

So when is this the right forum?

The CCB is not a weaker federal court. It is a forum that trades away the jury, the injunction, the appeal and everything above $30,000, in exchange for a price an ordinary creator can actually pay. For a copied photograph, a lifted blog post, an unlicensed track in someone's video — the disputes that have never been worth a lawyer and so have never been worth anything — that trade is obviously correct.

What it cannot do is make the other side turn up. So the honest way to use it is as the rung above the takedown and the demand letter and below the federal complaint: cheap enough that an opt-out is an acceptable outcome, and serious enough that a lot of respondents settle rather than find out what happens on day sixty-one.