clusion that to be well protected you have to register either immediately after publication or before it.

In summary, it is important to remember that although the copyright law of the United States does not require a photographer to register his/her works to own the copyright to them, timely registration will serve the photographer's interests if the registered work is infringed by providing eligibility for attorney's fees and statutory damages. Your opponent's knowledge that these remedies are available to you will often enable you to negotiate a settlement without filing suit, or within a reasonable period of time after filing suit. Registration should be made before or immediately after publication.

Statutory damages are limited by law to a maximum of $100.000 per infringement. Many people construe this to mean that infringements often receive awards near this amount. In fact that is not the case. A survey of recent cases shows that awards for statutory damages are made after evaluating certain factors, including willfulness. extent of unauthorized use, and the commercial value of the unauthorized use(s). An award could be for $500, $5000. or $50.000. or any other amount, at the discretion of the court. Still, since the attor ney's fees are also covered, any award will exceed the monetary cost of prosecution.

3. How to register

Registration is simply the process of filing copies of photographs accompanied by an accurate and complete registration form with the US. Copyright Office, and receiving certificate of registration to show that such a deposit has been made. Any copy. nghtable work can be registered, a motion picture. a book, a painting, a CD-ROM. a

slide show, and, yes, photographs. But, just as the copyright law treats published and unpublished works differently, so do the regulations which govern registration. We'll examine these differences further on in this document.

There is a $20.00 fee for registering a copyrighted work. Obviously the greater number of photographs included in one registration the less expensive the registration cost per image. If you consider that on a given day a photographer can produce hundreds of separately copyrightable images, clearly registration could cost thousands of dollars unless done in some bulk fashion.

Registration can be made of single images or of groups of images. The single image registration is much the same for published and unpublished work. A photographer completes copyright registration form VA. adds two copies of a published work or one copy of an unpublished work. and the $20.00 filing fee. This is sent to the Copyright Office in Washington. D.C. (See Copyright Office information in addenda.)

When registering a group of photographs things become more complicated. There are options for photographers, again the options are divided by published or unpublished. And, the relative ease of the process is influenced by whether the work has been published or not.

Published photographs will be accepted by the Copyright Office for registration in groups under these narrow conditions. only.

1) Each photograph in the group was first published as a contribution to a collective work within a twelve month period. (A collective work is a magazine, periodical, etc.)

Note: Each tape requires its own form VA and $20.00 registration fee.

With this officially approved deposit form. photographers now have a simple, affordable, easily managed system to register their unpublished images.

Note: An example of a completed form VA. registering a videotaped bulk registration is included in the addenda at the back of this publication. A blank copy of Form VA is also included. It may be photocopied and used to register your work.

4. Preparing for

registration

Before establishing a system for registering your unpublished photographs certain analysis is in order. First, one must recog. nize that most of a photographer's work is unpublished, and at some point all work is unpublished. Now the simple fact is that any infringement is likely to be of a published work. So by registering all unpublished work, you will be protecting any photograph which is to be published later

Second, one must recognize, that many times. particularly in stock work, the pho tographer doesn't know which images have been published for months after that publication. When you add to that fact the difficulty of group registration of published work. it seems clear that the easiest. least expensive and most timely choice is to reg. ister your unpublished work.

If you decide to register your unpublished work you will have to consider that unpublished work is divided into four categones.

considered viable for eventual publication (rejects).

2) Inventory of images on hand that is part of your stock file and is likely to be sent to your stock agency. (Remember the sending of work to your stock agency constitutes publication, as offering your work to a party for further distribution). You should apply for registration before you send your submission to your stock agency.

3) Assignment photographs which will be. as outtakes, sent into inventory.

4) Assignment photographs which will be sent to the client for possible use.

While you might reasonably decide not to register images that fit into category 1. above, categories 2. 3 and 4 seem important to register.

There are no serious logistical problems for dealing with category 2 and 3 images. Regardless of the way that you create the deposit you have time to get the work done. However, category 4 images. those waiting to go to a client for a job. present a greater problem because the time available for creating the deposit is limited.

For the most part. if shooting black and white or color negative film a color contact sheet can be made to serve as the deposit for registration. But when you have photographed with transparency film the task of malang the deposit is harder to plan.

Although a color contact sheet or a color laser copy of a group of transparencies is an acceptable form of deposit, the equipment to produce these is not readily available: the cost of these methods on a per