What are the Penalties for Infringing a Copyright?
• If the work is registered within three months from the date of first publication, you can be sued for statutory damages. Statutory damages can be up to $100,000 plus attorney fees and court costs. How much you will have to pay depends on whether the court thinks the infringement was malicious. • If the work was not registered within three months from the date of first publication, you can only be sued for three times actual damages. Actual damages are how much money the author of the work lost because of the infringement. For example, if you sell two doll patterns at $10 each and make a profit of $16 ($8 each copy), the most you can pay in damages is $48 (3 times actual damages) not enough to pay an attorney. However, you have no way of knowing if the pattern is registered, so you could end up losing your home for a single copy. Even if you give it away instead of selling it, it is an infiringement because you took a potential sale away from the copyright owner. On a practical basis,
