A photographer in Indianapolis shoots a wedding, a storefront, a plate of food. The picture shows up on someone else’s website. A friend says “send a cease-and-desist.” Another friend says “sue them.” Both friends skip the part that actually matters under the Copyright Act: for a United States work, you generally cannot file a civil infringement suit until the Copyright Office has registered the work. Not applied. Registered.
That is §411(a). The Supreme Court closed the “I filed the application last Tuesday” loophole in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com. The certificate has to issue, or the Office has to refuse the application. An online deposit and a credit-card receipt are not a registration.
Two clocks, not one
Registration gets you in the courthouse door. A timely registration is what gets you statutory damages and attorneys’ fees under §412.
Timely means the registration was made before the infringement started, or within three months after first publication. Miss that window and you can still sue for actual damages and profits – if you can prove them. Proving what one scraped JPEG was worth, and what the restaurant actually made because of it, is how a $750 problem becomes a $15,000 problem that you cannot recover.
This is the part photographers keep learning the hard way. The picture was published on a portfolio site in March. The scrape happened in November. The registration was filed in December, after the angry email. The suit is allowed once the certificate issues. The statutory-damages count is not.
What “register the work” actually means
You register the photograph, or the group of photographs, not the business name and not the camera. Unpublished photos can go in as a group. Published photos have their own group option if they were published in the same calendar year and you meet the Office’s rules. A wedding gallery is not automatically one work. A year’s Instagram feed is not automatically one work.
The deposit has to be the work you intend to sue on. A low-res web crop of a different edit is how people pick fights with the Office that they did not need.
Foreign works have a different path into court. Most of the complaints this blog sees in the Southern and Northern Districts are U.S. photographs, U.S. software, U.S. text. Those need the certificate.
The cease-and-desist is not a substitute
A letter can ask the other side to take the picture down. It can preserve a claim. It cannot manufacture a registration date you do not have. If the plan is federal court, file the application first and wait. The Office is faster than it used to be. It is not same-afternoon fast.
If the plan is only a takedown, a registration still helps. Platforms and hosts are more likely to act on a registration number than on a caption that says “© 2026.”
What this blog will keep watching
When a copyright complaint lands in Indianapolis or Hammond and the registration dates are in the complaint – they usually are – those dates tell you which remedies are even in play. A complaint that pleads statutory damages on a work registered after the scrape is making a claim the statute does not give it. That is a drafting problem, not a jury problem.
Register the pictures you care about. Do it when you publish them, or at least within three months. Then worry about the letter.
Stay tuned for the docket updates.
Kenan L. Farrell, KLF Legal, Indianapolis
