The Copyright Claims Board: A New Court for Small Copyright Claims
The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (“CASE”) Act was recently signed into law by Congress and creates a new court for efficiently resolving small copyright claims in the United States. This article will discuss why this court was created, how it works, and what it means for your business.
What is the Copyright Small Claims Court and Why Was it Created?
The Copyright Office was asked by Congress to examine the process through which copyright disputes are handled in courts across the country. The Copyright Office spent two years reviewing the process and collecting input from the public before providing a report. Two particularly important ideas were presented in this report.
First, many authors, artists, and other creative individuals and businesses are often unable to enforce their rights against accused infringers because of the sky-high cost of litigation. Second, a more streamlined conflict resolution system tailored to small claims might help address this problem. We will now examine each of these ideas in a bit more depth.
Litigation is expensive, and the majority of copyright claims are not large enough to justify bringing a lawsuit for most copyright owners. A couple of statistics are helpful in demonstrating this issue. As of 2015, 88.4% of copyright and trademark offenses involved infringement amounts of less than $1,000,000. In the same year, 55.8% of copyright and trademark offenses involved infringement amounts of $120,000 or less. This relatively high concentration of smaller copyright infringement actions can pose a significant problem for small businesses and individuals for a couple of reasons. One is that, because infringement actions can be long and expensive, the investment of time and money required to succeed in an infringement action are just not worth it to copyright owners with small claims.
Another reason small copyright claims have been hard to bring is that small businesses often do not have the resources required to fund infringement actions even if they desire to. They therefore need to enter into contingent fee arrangements with their attorneys to enforce their rights. Although contingent fee agreements can be beneficial for clients and lawyers, these arrangements present a significant amount of risk for law firms, so it can be difficult to find an attorney willing to bring a lawsuit with a contingent fee when the potential payoff is small.
What the Copyright Claims Board Does for Small Businesses
Enter the Copyright Claims Board (CCB). The CCB is a copyright small claims court created under the CASE Act, which is set to begin operations in December of 2021. The CCB will be located in the Copyright Office and will have three judges called “copyright claims officers” who will hear small claims and render decisions on how to resolve copyright disputes. Here are the key points on how the CCB will work:
The maximum amount in a dispute eligible for CCB review will be $30,000. This includes $15,000 of statutory damages per registered work and $7,500 per work without an application for copyright registration filed within certain time requirements.
Parties on the receiving end (defendants) of one of these lawsuits will have the opportunity to “opt out” of the CCB process. This means that the CCB will not review the dispute, but the dispute may continue in federal court.
The CCB will include streamlined procedures that limit that amount of discovery in a case and will rely mostly on written material. This saves time and energy on developing the evidence used in a dispute.
The CCB will allow both claims by copyright owners and counterclaims by defendants.
Plaintiffs bringing actions in bad faith will be subject to additional fees, and repeat abusers of the CCB process will be barred from using it.
What does the Copyright Small Claims Court mean for you?
The CCB is intended to provide a faster, more efficient, and less expensive option for enforcing rights in your copyrighted material. This means that it may be easier for you or your business to stop accused infringers from using your protected creative works and to monetize your work in the future. To learn more about obtaining federal copyright protection, enforcement rights, and how you might be able to make the most of this new law, please feel free to schedule your initial consultation using the link below!
Written by Benjamin Rothermel and Connor Jaccard.