Page:Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corporation v. Wall-street.com, LLC, et al..pdf/3

Syllabus

ing registration, not to the copyright claimant’s request for registration.

Fourth Estate’s contrary reading stems in part from its misapprehension of the significance of certain 1976 revisions to the Copyright Act. But in enacting §411(a), Congress both reaffirmed the general rule that registration must precede an infringement suit and added an exception in that provision’s second sentence to cover instances in which registration is refused. That exception would have no work to do if Congress intended the 1976 revisions to clarify that a copyright claimant may sue immediately upon applying for registration. Noteworthy, too, in years following the 1976 revisions, Congress resisted efforts to eliminate §411(a), which contains the registration requirement.

Fourth Estate also argues that, because “registration is not a condition of copyright protection,” §408(a), §411(a) should not bar a copyright claimant from enforcing that protection in court once she has applied for registration. But the Copyright Act safeguards copyright owners by vesting them with exclusive rights upon creation of their works and prohibiting infringement from that point forward. To recover for such infringement, copyright owners must simply apply for registration and await the Register’s decision. Further, Congress has authorized preregistration infringement suits with respect to works vulnerable to predistribution infringement, and Fourth Estate’s fear that a copyright owner might lose the ability to enforce her rights entirely is overstated. True, registration processing times have increased from one to two weeks in 1956 to many months today. Delays, in large part, are the result of Copyright Office staffing and budgetary shortages that Congress can alleviate, but courts cannot cure. Unfortunate as the current administrative lag may be, that factor does not allow this Court to revise §411(a)’s congressionally composed text. Pp. 7–12.

856 F. 3d 1338, affirmed.

Ginsburg, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.