You don't have to choose: each registration does something the other cannot. The U.S. Copyright Office gives you the procedural strength you need inside your own country. Safe Creative covers you across the 180+ countries of the Berne Convention, certifies your creative process and puts your use of artificial intelligence on the record. Start with Safe Creative, which takes minutes and protects you from today, and add the U.S. layer whenever you want: we handle the filing.
Certifying sketches and work-in-progress requires an active subscription: it follows the whole life of the work, not a single moment. A finished work can also be registered pay-as-you-go, from 23 USD.
Each one covers what the other cannot. That is why they add up.
Plagiarism doesn't wait
until you finish your work
Ideas get shown before they are finished: to a client, to a collaborator, to a competition, on a livestream. That is exactly the moment when most people have no proof of anything.
When only the final file exists, the discussion comes down to one party's word against the other's. There is nothing earlier to show.
Signing a file or saving it with your computer's date proves little against a third party. A timestamp is issued by someone who is not an interested party.
Registering the finished work protects the finished work. What happened during months of work can only be proven if you kept a record of it.
Your drafts tell your story as an author. Certify them at every stage and reach the end with the whole chain, not with a single loose file.
Every piece you upload gets its own timestamp, long before the work is finished. Available with an active subscription.
sketches · drafts · notes · fragments · intermediate versions · prompts · work-in-progress captures
You can keep everything with no public information, visible only from your account. Nobody sees the process until you want them to.
When you finish, you register it with Safe Creative: international scope under the Berne Convention, a certificate with the creativity declaration and the process pieces linked to it.
If your market is the United States, territorial registration is what lets you claim there with every card in your hand.
Certifying protects your process. Registering the work protects the result in any country. And the U.S. registration is what lets you enforce it there in court.
Shows who created first, and how.
It is the piece that ties the path to the result.
It lets you enforce that right in court.
Proof of authorship today plus USCO registration tomorrow: your work defended from start to finish, not only from the date you called it done.
When you register the work you don't get a receipt: you get a document with the file hashes, a double timestamp, the verified owner and the creativity declaration with the human/AI split phase by phase. All of it with a public verification code.
| Phase | Human | AI |
|---|---|---|
| Concept and vision of the work | 85% | 15% |
| Creative direction | 100% | 0% |
| Production | 70% | 30% |
Illustrative example of the section as it appears in an issued certificate. The percentages are declared by the author.
The traceability report and the declaration of originality are produced with frontier AI models and are for guidance only: they do not replace the professional advice that the intended final use may require. We only work with providers under a ZDR (Zero Data Retention) commitment: neither your work nor the generated document is stored, used to train models or accessible to the provider's staff. Included in the Personal, Business and Enterprise plans.
Anyone, of any nationality, can sue for infringement in the United States. The difference between doing it with or without a registration is enormous.
The Supreme Court held in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com (2019) that applying for registration is not enough: the Office must have acted on the application. Which is why it is better not to leave it until there is already a conflict on the table.
Statutory damages —up to $150,000 per work for wilful infringement— and attorney's fees are only available if you registered before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication. Outside that window you are left with actual damages, which are often zero.
The effective date of registration is the date the complete application is received, not the date of the certificate. Filing early is worth as much as registering early, even if the paper takes months to arrive.
An infringer facing statutory damages plus fees has an incentive to negotiate. Against actual damages of a few hundred dollars, many prefer to litigate.
You must disclose AI-generated material that is more than de minimis, describe the human contribution and exclude that material from the claim. The tool is never listed as an author.
If, while examining your application, the Office sees signs that AI was involved, it opens correspondence and asks for an explanation. Depending on your answer, it may require the specific assets where it was used, and those elements are left out of the registration.
A lot is decided there: whoever arrives with the split already declared and the process documented defines the exclusion themselves and answers in days. Whoever has to reconstruct it from memory drags out the file and risks a broader exclusion than necessary.
See how the process is documentedWhen you request USCO registration from your account, we act as your authorised agent to register the work on your behalf. We start from what we already have —the data and the files of your registration—, we ask you only for what is missing and we file. Usually in under seven business days.
You follow the status of the procedure from your account, and if the Office raises any question, our team handles it.
I want you to handle itOfficial figures published by the Copyright Office. They fluctuate quite a bit, so we review this section every six months.
Official U.S. Copyright Office fees, for guidance only and subject to change by the Office itself; group registration options with their own fees exist for photographs, serials and unpublished works. Last reviewed: .
Every piece you add gets its own timestamp, and that is what builds the chain. You don't need to keep absolutely everything: what matters are the milestones —the first idea, the change of direction, the version you showed someone— because those are the ones that get disputed later.
The area for sketches and work-in-progress is available with an active subscription. It makes sense: it follows the whole life of the work, not a one-off act like registering something already finished.
Only if you want it to be. You can keep the process in registrations with no public information, accessible only from your account. That is what we recommend while the work is in development.
No. Anyone, whatever their nationality, can register and can sue for infringement in the United States. What changes without the registration record are the remedies: the claim is limited to actual damages, that is, the greater of two amounts —what the owner lost or what the infringer gained— and in many cases that figure ends up being zero.
We usually file the application in under seven business days and you can follow the status from your account. From there, the times the Office works with usually run from three to nine months, sometimes more, and there are also cases resolved in six weeks. The published average for the last available half-year is 4.1 months.
Remember that the effective date is the filing date, so the wait does not penalise you on that point.
No, they cover different things. The Safe Creative one evidences authorship and priority with international scope and is the one you will use day to day: takedowns, claims, platforms, negotiations or assignments. The USCO one is territorial and designed for litigating in the United States. And only the first documents how you got to the work.
You can register the human authorship part. The Office requires you to disclose AI-generated material that is more than de minimis and to describe your contribution, and it refuses works generated entirely by AI: writing prompts, however elaborate, is not enough on its own. Selection and arrangement of the outputs and the creative modifications you make to them do count.
Both coverages · No need to choose
If you are creating, subscribe and certify the process from today. If your work is already finished, register it and you are covered in more than 180 countries. And whenever you want to add U.S. protection, we take care of it.
Legal notice. This page is informative and does not constitute legal advice. Safe Creative acts as authorised agent to file the application for registration with the U.S. Copyright Office on behalf of the applicant; the decision on registration rests exclusively with that Office, which may request additional information or refuse the application. Times are estimates based on data published by the Office itself and fluctuate. Fees are the official ones in force in 2026 and may be modified at any time. Registration with Safe Creative is voluntary and complementary to the protection the Berne Convention recognises from the moment of creation; it provides proof of authorship and a certain date whose weight is for the body or party analysing it to assess, and it does not replace territorial registration or the assistance of a lawyer in proceedings in the United States. References to U.S. law (17 U.S.C. §§ 410, 411 and 412) and to case law are offered by way of illustration and do not prejudge the outcome of any matter. Documenting the creative process does not by itself guarantee the outcome of an authorship dispute.
