Don’t Miss Out on Settlements: The Hidden Value of Copyright Registration for Your Creative Works

For authors and screenwriters, registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office is one of the most important and overlooked steps in safeguarding your creative rights.

Yes, your manuscript, screenplay, or other creative work is “protected” the moment you create it. And technically, that’s true: U.S. copyright attaches upon creation. However, when it comes to enforcement, monetary recovery, and real-world leverage, registration is the difference between having theoretical rights and having teeth.

Registration is Proof and Leverage

To bring a copyright infringement claim in federal court, you must have a copyright registration (or at least a pending application).

When your work is filed with the Copyright Office, the government creates an official timestamp—an objective record of authorship. In a world of AI-generated material, shared drafts, cloud files, and digital timestamps that can be manipulated, this matters. Registration provides:

• Presumption of ownership

• Presumption of originality

• Presumption of the date of creation

For screenwriters and filmmakers, this is essential for purposes of chain-of-title.

All of these dramatically strengthen your bargaining position if someone copies or exploits your work without permission.

Statutory Damages

If your work is infringed after you register it, you become eligible for statutory damages and attorneys’ fees. This alone is the number one reason every writer should file early.

Here’s why:

• Without registration: you can only recover actual damages, which can be minimal or hard to prove.

• With registration: you can recover statutory damages of $750 to $30,000, or up to $150,000 for willful infringement, plus attorneys’ fees.

In other words, registration shifts the financial risk from the creator to the infringer. It creates immediate legal leverage—often enough to resolve a dispute without ever filing a lawsuit.

The Anthropic Settlement: A Real-Time Example

One of the clearest illustrations of why registration matters is the Anthropic AI copyright settlement, which provides $3,000 per registered work to eligible authors whose writings were used to train Anthropic’s models.

But here’s the catch:

Only works that were registered with the U.S. Copyright Office before the settlement are automatically eligible for payment..

The Anthropic case is not an anomaly. As AI litigation ramps up, copyright class actions and negotiated settlements will likely follow along with registered works are automatically counted and unregistered works are not.

If you are an author, a searchable list of books included in the Anthropic case can be found here.

The Bottom Line for Creators

If you’re a writer, screenwriter, filmmaker, or creator of any kind, filing your work with the Copyright Office is one of the most cost-effective protections available. For around $65, you secure protection that could be worth thousands—or more.

In a world where content is constantly shared, scraped, and repurposed, copyright registration is essential.