urbanphotos.net put up this web page in response to the HUGE amount of incorrect information about copyright law that you can find on the Internet. Out of all the discussion forums, personal web sites and blogs we've seen; about 4 out of 5 sites contain partially to completely wrong information.

All the information on this web page is from reliable sources: the language of the laws themselves and the US Copyright Office.

As the above excerpt from the US Copyright Office web site states, an artist in the USA automatically owns copyright to his or her work; but in order to enforce that copyright, the work must be registered with the US Copyright Office.

Furthermore, Registered works may be eligible for statutory damages and attorney's fees in successful litigation. What does this mean? It means that if you register your work before an infringement occurs, you can be awarded statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement AND your legal expenses if you win the case. If you registered your work after an infringement occurred, you can only be awarded 'actual damages' which means how much income the infringer earned by using your work. It isn't financially viable to spend $20,000 or more suing someone in order to recover $500 of actual damages. Registering your work is the only sensible and viable option for artists.

The fee to electronically register copyright is only $35 if you do it online at www.copyright.gov . If the government legalese is too confusing, we will electronically register your copyright ownership for you for $99 total cost. Attorneys typically charge several hundred dollars for this exact same service. Your name will be on all documentation (or whoever's name you want to assign ownership to); urbanphotos.net is only performing the registration for you. Our name will be listed as a "duly authorized agent", which is required for third party registrations. After we upload your images to the copyright office for registration, we delete them. Your art or photos will never be used for any purpose other than to complete your copyright registration.

We are not offering services for registering by mail. Your material must be in digital format.

Good news if you have a lot of images: you do not pay $35 to register each image. You can register hundreds or thousands all at once. The rules to qualify for multiple registration are as follows: multiple unpublished works if they are all by the same author(s) and owned by the same claimant; OR multiple published works if they are all first published together in the same publication on the same date and owned by the same claimant.

urbanphotos.net will register copyrights for PHOTOGRAPHS, DIGITAL ART or TEXT (books, poems, song lyrics) only. We are not offering this service to musicians at this time. If your art is not in digital format, just scan it or photograph it with a digital camera. Slogans and short phrases do not qualify for copyright protection; those fall under trademark law which is a totally different concept. Only submit your own originally created visual art, text and photographs for registration. You cannot register copyright to someone else's work or public domain content.

If you are registering more than a few dozen images, you will need to resize your images into .JPG format thumbnails (we recommend a size of 240 x 180 pixels for up to 500 images; smaller for more than 500 images). The free software JAlbum will do this for you. Create a photo album with it, then just e-mail us the folder named "thumbs".

Our $99 fee includes the US Copyright Office registration fee. You pay $99 total. You will receive your copyright registration certificate from the US Copyright Office in two to three months. If for some reason you need multiple registrations, the fee is $99 per registration.

Your registration will be processed within ONE BUSINESS DAY of receiving all the required information:

* Your name, office or residence address, phone number, and e-mail address

* Date and country of publication if the work you are registering has been published, and what form of publication was used (web site, book, poster, etc.)

* Also, if you want your copyright registration certificate mailed to a different address, indicate a mailing address separately from your residence or office address.

You may e-mail this information to us or include it in the notes field during the checkout procedure.

urbanphotos.net will notify you when your registration has been accepted by the copyright office. From that moment onward, you are legally protected.

$99 Copyright Registration

Questions, comments, and e-mail address for images to be registered: urbanphotos@gmail.com

This is what your Copyright Registration certificate will look like.