Visual Artists Copyright Reform Bill Allows Registration of 3,000 Photos at Once, Introduces Subscription Fees

The Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act of 2025 (VACRA) is a major attempt to drag the copyright registration process for visual artists—think photographers, graphic designers, and sculptors—out of the 1990s and into the digital age. This bill cuts the cord on physical deposits for these works, shifting the entire process to electronic filing and introducing several new, efficiency-focused options aimed squarely at creators with high-volume digital workflows.

Goodbye Physical Copies, Hello Digital Archives

For decades, if you wanted to register a painting or a photograph, you had to physically send a copy to the Copyright Office for the Library of Congress collection. VACRA scraps this for pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, requiring only a single electronic copy for registration (Sec. 2). This is a huge win for anyone whose work exists purely in the digital realm, saving time and shipping costs. However, the bill introduces a complex new layer: certified third-party registries for photographs. These private entities would collect and archive your photographs and related data for the full copyright term, offering a free, searchable database. Depositing your work with one of these certified registries would satisfy the official registration deposit requirement. While this decentralizes the archive and could streamline the process, it means creators will rely on a private company to securely hold their official copyright proof for potentially 70+ years. If a registry goes belly-up, what happens to your proof?

Registering 3,000 Photos with One Click

One of the most practical changes is the new group registration option for photographers (Sec. 3). Currently, registering a large volume of photos can be tedious and expensive. VACRA mandates the Register of Copyrights create regulations allowing a photographer to register up to 3,000 photographs with a single application and fee. The best part? This applies regardless of whether the photos are published or unpublished, or when they were created. For a wedding photographer, a stock image contributor, or a graphic designer who produces hundreds of assets a year, this is a massive time-saver and cost reduction. The bill even requires the regulations to be updated later to increase the 3,000-photo limit as technology improves.

Securing Your Date Sooner: Deferred Registration

The bill also creates a deferred registration option (Sec. 4). This is designed for creators who need to establish an effective registration date quickly, perhaps because they suspect infringement or need to enforce their rights with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. You submit an application and deposit electronically, pay a fee that is capped at no more than half the standard filing cost, and your registration date is secured. The full examination for registration can happen later, whenever the copyright owner decides to pay the remaining fee. Think of it like getting a placeholder in line: you establish your priority date now, but the full paperwork review happens when you’re ready. This is a smart move for protecting time-sensitive works.

Modernizing the System and the Cost

VACRA requires the Copyright Office to build a modern, public-facing online application system that can actually talk to the software professional creators use (Sec. 5). The goal is to allow information and deposits to be automatically transmitted to populate an application, cutting down on manual data entry. Furthermore, the bill introduces new fee structures (Sec. 7), including the deferred registration fee and, crucially, yearly and periodic registration subscriptions for visual works. While the details of the subscription costs are left to future regulation, the bill directs the Register to ensure professional creators can afford to register all their works and to provide reduced fees for individual authors and small businesses. This shift toward subscription models could make registration a predictable, affordable operating cost rather than a prohibitive one-off expense.