U.S. Copyright Office (Copyright Office)

between 2 and 10 years before the effective termination date^{1, 2}

before the effective termination date; recording it is a condition of the termination taking effect^{1, 2}

a 5-year window after 35 years from the grant's execution¹

a 5-year window after the earlier of 35 years from publication or 40 years from execution¹

a 5-year window after 56 years from when copyright was secured, or January 1, 1978, if later³

within 1 month of execution in the United States, 2 months if executed abroad; unless it is recorded before the later transfer, a later good-faith transfer recorded first can prevail¹

Copyright ownership may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property under intestate succession, so copyrights are estate property. The will, trust or state intestacy law determines who inherits.¹

An executor, administrator, trustee or heir who received a copyright through the estate may record the transfer, creating a public record of the chain of title. Recording is voluntary and has no deadline.⁷

Recording gives constructive notice of the facts in the document only if it identifies the work so a reasonable search would reveal it and the work is registered. An unregistered work gets no constructive notice from recording alone.¹

Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978 lasts for the author's life plus 70 years, or the last surviving author's life plus 70 years for a joint work. Every term runs to the end of the calendar year in which it would otherwise expire.³

Works made for hire and anonymous or pseudonymous works are protected for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first. Most deceased authors' copyrights are still active and pass through the estate as property.³

Copyrights secured before 1978 ran a 28-year first term and a 67-year renewal term. For works copyrighted from 1964 through 1977, renewal is automatic, and renewal registration is optional at any time during the renewal term.⁸

For works copyrighted before 1964, renewal had to be registered in the 28th year of the first term; if it was not, protection was lost and cannot be regained.⁸

Termination of transfer lets the author's statutory successors end a grant the author made and reclaim the rights, notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary. Grants made by will and grants covering works made for hire cannot be terminated.²

Registration is not required: copyright exists from the moment a work is fixed, so unregistered works are part of the estate. Registration is required before an infringement suit for a U.S. work and is what unlocks statutory damages and attorney's fees.⁹

A recorded statement of the author's death matters mainly for 17 U.S.C. § 302(e): a person who obtains a certified report showing nothing to indicate the author is living may presume the author has been dead at least 70 years.³

No death report is required, and nothing is forfeited without one. Any person with an interest in a copyright may at any time record a statement of the author's date of death, or that the author was living on a particular date, and the Register keeps current records of it.³

A statement of the author's death has no regulation, form or scheduled fee. It is excluded from the ordinary recordation rule and from Form DCS, and is sent to the Office as correspondence.^{10, 11}

Notices of termination cannot be filed through the electronic Recordation System. They are mailed on paper with Form TCS, at the paper fee of $125 for one work plus $60 per group of 10 or fewer additional works.^{12, 11, 5}

The notice recorded must be a true, correct, complete and legible copy of the signed notice as served, with the date and manner of service if the notice does not state them, and an effective termination date later than the date of recordation.¹³

Electronic recordation at record.copyright.gov uses a Login.gov account and Pay.gov payment, accepts a will as a document type and is faster than paper. The effective date of recordation is the date the Office receives a complete submission in acceptable form.^{9, 7}

Recording a document costs $95 electronically or $125 on paper, covering one work identified by one title or registration number. Each additional transfer costs $95, and special handling for recording a document costs $550.⁵

Additional works and alternate identifiers cost $60 per 1-50, $225 per 51-500, $390 per 501-1,000, $555 per 1,001-10,000 and $5,500 above that electronically, or $60 per group of 10 or fewer on paper.⁵

After the author's death, the widow or widower owns the entire termination interest unless children or grandchildren survive. Then the widow or widower owns one-half, and the children and grandchildren divide the other half per stirpes, by the number of the author's children represented.¹

Where the author was not living, the renewal claimants are the widow or widower and children, then the author's executors if the author left a will, then the next of kin if there was no will, or any successor or assign in whom the renewal term vested.³

If the author's widow or widower, children and grandchildren are not living, the executor, administrator, personal representative or trustee owns the entire termination interest. A termination must be made by those owning more than one-half of the interest.¹

A pre-1978 grant is terminated by the same statutory successors as a later grant, and a grant executed by persons other than the author is terminated by the surviving persons who executed it.³

The estate or heir can register the decedent's unregistered works at any time during the copyright term, applying as the copyright claimant: the person or organization that has obtained ownership of all rights initially belonging to the author.⁸

Section 304(d), a second chance at the 75-year mark for grants whose § 304(c) window had lapsed, is closed. The last day to serve a § 304(d) notice was October 26, 2017, and the Office no longer accepts such notices because they had to be recorded before October 26, 2019.²

Free online collections include the Copyright Public Records System (1898-1945 and 1978 to the present), the Virtual Card Catalog of 41.5 million scanned index cards (1870-1977, including transfers of ownership), the Catalog of Copyright Entries (1891-1978) and the Early Copyright Records collection (1790-1870).⁶