Online copyright registration

Cover starts as soon as we receive the work, it is protected from the point you complete the online transaction.

Yes. Copyright itself is an automatic international right and protects your work across the world. Our registration provides independent verification of your work, and you can use this as evidence to support your rights at a worldwide level.

There are some specific notes that apply only to US citizens, but as copyright itself is governed by international conventions, it should not matter where the author lives or where the infringement occurs.

At the end of the registration period we will automatically contact you, and you will be offered the chance to extend the registration at a discounted rate. It is also possible to extend any registration with less than 5 years remaining using the online registration renewal form.

Only if you have specifically ordered them. You will receive an digital copy of both your invoice and Certificate/Schedule of Revision as PDF documents. If you require a paper certificate these (and also labels) can be ordered on the form when you make your submission.

No, that is not how the service operates. Apart from the security risks of such an option, this would severely reduce the strength of the evidence that registration provides.

Every deposit you make must be treated as a separate item of legal evidence, with its own chain of custody and processed accordingly. You can of course submit updates to your work, but this must be through the formal update procedure as explained in our registration updates fact sheet.

No. We must to treat every deposit as a separate item of legal evidence and process it accordingly, so there is always a fee of some kind when you submit work, otherwise the service could not operate.

It is however possible to make further submissions to an existing registration as registration updates. Updates to an existing registration are charged at a reduced rate and just like the initial registration deposit, each update deposit is processed as separate item of evidence with its own chain of custody.

Submissions up to 20GB* in size can be made using the on-line registration system (*individual file limit is 4GB, but multiple files can be included in a single submission up to the 20GB maximum).

If you have a large number of files, we do suggest that you use an archiving program such as WinZip, StuffIt or Tar, to preserve your directory structure and simplify your upload.

No, we do not set a limit for the number of files, but for you own convenience, if your work involves a lot of files, we do recommend you use an archive program such as WinZip, WinRar/Rar, 7-Zip, StuffIt, or Tar. This will allow you to combine all your files into one manageable file, and also compresses your files which may reduce the cost of registering. When uploading remember that you need to complete the transaction using the same connection, using compression can make a significant difference to upload times.

There are no restrictions on the number of works you may register at the same time. Once again, please be aware of any time-restrictions you may have on your Internet connection.

The speed that a file uploads will depend on your connection speed, and make take some considerable time to complete.

Upload failures can be caused by dial-up connections dropping, broadband connections temporarily dropping and also by your operating system power management options placing your computer into standby or hibernation.

Additionally some web browsers will fail to upload very large files, and none will upload files over 4GB. You may try splitting your files into smaller chunks before uploading (perhaps using an archiving program like WinRar or Rar or the Split utility on Unix systems).

Please see our upload information page for further details.

If the total file size of the work is large, or if you continue to experience problems a postal submission may be a better option.

The maximum size of an individual file we accept is 4GB. It should however be noted that you can upload as many files as you like within a single registration, and the overall size limit for a single deposit is 20GB, so you can still register large works such as films by submitting them as several files.

Yes, indeed we recommend compression, if you have many smaller files, it allows you to create a single archive, (rather than uploading many individual files). It may also reduce costs as your upload will be smaller.

Although you can submit several items within a single registration, a registration can only have a single identifying title. You should only group together items which form part of an overall work, for example; a collection of poems that will be published together, an album of music (along with artwork and lyrics), etc.