The Copyright Claims Board Has Taken 1,920 Cases. It Has Ruled on 47.

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 built the United States' first intellectual property small-claims tribunal on a single premise: federal court is too expensive for most copyright disputes to be worth pursuing.▸ The Copyright Claims Board (CCB), housed inside the U.S. Copyright Office, opened for filings in June 2022 to give photographers, musicians, and small publishers a forum where they would not need a lawyer or a federal court's filing fee to make a claim worth a few thousand dollars.

Almost four years in, the Office's own cumulative statistics — updated through March 2026 — show how far that premise has traveled: 1,920 claims filed, and 47 final determinations issued.

The CASE Act set a floor: total CCB filing fees must be at least $100.▸ The Copyright Office's regulations split that into two payments — $40 due when a claimant files, and a second $60 due only if the proceeding survives to become "active," meaning the respondent didn't opt out and the claim cleared review. A claimant who never reaches the active phase pays $40 and nothing more.

Federal court costs four times that just to walk in the door.▸ Instituting a civil action in U.S. District Court requires a $350 statutory filing fee, plus a $55 administrative fee that has applied since December 2023 — $405 before a claimant has paid an attorney for a single hour.

That price difference is the whole point of the CCB, and it shows in who uses it: 67% of claimants represent themselves, with no attorney at all, per the CCB's own statistics.▸ Another 17% are in-house counsel or business representatives; only 16% hired outside counsel.

Filing for $40 turns out to be the easy part.▸ The CCB's cumulative disposition data — every outcome recorded against every claim filed since June 2022 — shows a funnel that narrows hard before a case ever reaches a hearing.

The single largest outcome isn't a ruling, a settlement, or even an opt-out to federal court — it's dismissal at compliance review, which has claimed 787 claims, 41% of everything filed.▸ The Copyright Office's February 2026 CASE Act Report put a number on why: "As of December 31, 2025, only 43% of all claims filed were found compliant, whether on the first try or after receiving one or two noncompliance orders. 63% of all claims received at least one noncompliance order or were dismissed as unsuitable due to noncompliance." Claimants get up to two 30-day windows to fix a noncompliant claim, but of those who received a noncompliance order, "less than a third went on to successfully file a compliant claim," the report found.

Self-representation carries a cost here.▸ One commenter cited in the report, copyright attorney Melissa Eckhause, estimated that in the CCB's first year "almost 75% of pro se parties' initial claims were not compliant compared to about 31% of claims filed by attorneys" — and that over half of pro se cases were ultimately dismissed for exactly that reason. The Authors Guild called the pattern "an unsurprising result given the number of self-represented parties" the CCB was built to serve in the first place.

Beyond compliance, 272 claims (14%) were dismissed for failing to file valid proof of service, 168 respondents (9%) opted out — sending the claimant back to federal court or nowhere — and 154 claimants (8%) withdrew with the settlement outcome unrecorded.▸ An additional 337 claims are still working through the initial or active phase as of the March 2026 cutoff, by this piece's arithmetic on the CCB's published totals. That leaves 155 recorded settlements (8%) and 47 final determinations (2.4%) — 25 from contested proceedings, 22 by default.

The CCB runs on three Copyright Claims Officers, appointed to renewable, staggered six-year terms, supported by three Copyright Claims Attorneys — each required to have at least three years of copyright experience — plus a paralegal specialist and a program specialist, eight staff in total.▸ To stand the tribunal up, the Copyright Office requested $3.2 million and 8 FTEs for fiscal 2022: $1.0 million in one-time costs for IT systems, an audiovisual setup, and office space, and $2.2 million in recurring costs, $1.7 million of it salary and benefits for those eight positions.

What claimants collect when they win is modest by design — the CASE Act caps damages at $30,000 on the standard track and $5,000 on the smaller claims track, and the CCB's determinations have stayed well under both ceilings.▸ As of December 31, 2025, damages were awarded in 72% of final determinations — 57% of contested proceedings, 86% of defaults, per the CASE Act Report. When damages were awarded, the average was $2,392.17 in contested proceedings and $4,360.53 in default proceedings; the single largest award on record is $11,000, the smallest $750.

Set against the tribunal's operating cost, those payouts are small.▸ One commenter, the advocacy coalition Re:Create, told the Copyright Office that "the payouts to intended [CCB] beneficiaries over the course of the last two years ($75,000) amount to barely more than 1% of the agency's budget for those years ($5.4 million)" — a comparison the Office reprinted in its own report without disputing the underlying figures. The Office's response wasn't to contest the math but to reject the premise: citing the Copyright Alliance, it argued that "the cost of running an important public benefit like the CCB has no bearing on its true value," pointing instead to settlements and licensing deals the tribunal's mere existence is credited with encouraging, which don't show up in either figure.

The Office's own growth numbers put the current snapshot in motion: as of the end of February 2025, 1,186 claims had been filed and the CCB had issued 33 final determinations.▸ Thirteen months later, filings had grown 62% to 1,920; final determinations had grown 42% to 47.

Disposition, staffing, damages, and compliance figures are drawn from the Copyright Claims Board's own cumulative statistics (through March 2026) and the Copyright Office's February 2026 CASE Act Report (underlying data as of December 31, 2025). The 337-claim "still in progress" figure is this piece's arithmetic on the CCB's published dispositions, not a category the CCB publishes itself. Figures attributed to public commenters (Re:Create, Melissa Eckhause) are their estimates, quoted as reproduced in the Copyright Office's official report, not the Office's own audited numbers.