The Benefits of Filing Quarterly
There are three main benefits to filing your forms on a quarterly basis with the U.S. Copyright Office: You will be more likely to remember to actually file, you will save money on mandatory filing fees, and you will file within the time limits required for demanding statutory damages if necessary in the future.
Most professional magazine writers are required to send in quarterly income-tax payments to the Internal Revenue Service. You can use these quarterly dates as a reminder that it's also time to file your copyright registrations for all of the articles you've written in the past three months.
Remembering to File
Remember that calendar you put together in Chapter 9, to keep track of all your writing assignment due dates and avoid deadline overload? Well, that calendar is also a terrific place to make notes about the quarterly dates when your income-tax payments are due — and when you can file your copyright registrations as well.
After a few quarterly cycles during your first year as a magazine writer, submitting your forms every quarter to the U.S. Copyright Office along with your tax payments to the IRS will simply become an old habit. And that's just perfect for making sure you actually file the forms amid all your other writing activities.
Saving Money
As you read earlier in this chapter, you can file form GR/CP as an addendum to Form TX, thus registering multiple articles at one time. The good news is not just that this saves you paperwork, but also that it saves you money. Lots and lots of money.
The fee for filing Form TX is $45, but there is no additional charge for filing Form GR/CP as an addendum — and listing as many other eligible articles as you would like to register at the same time. This makes the quarterly filing process quite cost-effective, especially if you have a particularly prolific few months in a row of work.
So, let's say you have ten articles that appeared in print in the previous quarter. You can register ten versions of Form TX, and pay $45 apiece, for a total of $450, or you can register one Form TX with the Form GR/CP addendum, thus paying only the original $45 fee and saving yourself $405 overall.
Saving those dollars obviously makes a great deal of sense, as they will add up substantially over the life of your magazine-writing career. If you write forty articles a year for five years and file individual forms, you'll pay a total of $9,000. If you group the articles quarterly for those five years, you'll pay a total of $900. The difference is $8,100 over five years — more than enough to upgrade your laptop with all of the newest software to keep your magazine-writing career booming.
Meeting Time Limits
Again, it bears repeating that filing for copyright protection on a timely basis will preserve your right to demand statutory damages should your copyright ever be infringed. By filing quarterly, you will always meet the deadline that the government imposes. And you will be happy that you did should the day come when your copyright is violated.
