The Copyright Office prices a $741.02 service at $6.

The safe harbour of 17 U.S.C. § 512 is discussed as a doctrine. Knowledge, red flags, repeat-infringer policies, financial benefit, the right and ability to control. Lawyers argue it; courts weigh it. All of that is downstream of a condition that is not an argument at all. § 512(c)(2) makes the whole defence available only to a provider that has “designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement” by making the agent’s details available on its own site “and by providing such information to the Copyright Office.” No form, no defence. The form costs $6.

Read 37 CFR 201.38 and the form turns out to be a disclosure of residence. The designation must carry the provider’s “full legal name and physical street address,” published both in the Office’s public directory and “on its website in a location accessible to the public.” Then the sentence that does the work: “A post office box may not be substituted for the street address for the service provider.” A waiver exists, but only on a written request to the Register of Copyrights, in exceptional circumstances such as a demonstrable threat to personal safety, and the Office charges nothing for deciding it.

Nobody priced that clause until this year. The 2026 fee study did, and the number is the finding. Item 25 of the proposed schedule — “Designation of agent under 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(2) to receive notification of claimed infringement, or amendment or resubmission of designation” — carries a current fee of $6, a proposed fee of $25, and a calculated cost of service of $741.02. The Office explains the gap in one clause: the cost is driven by reviewing the post-office-box requests. It then declines to close it, proposing “only a slight fee increase from $6 to $25” in order “to maintain accessibility for service providers of all sizes.”

So the federal government has measured, published and then absorbed the cost of letting small operators not publish where they live. $741.02 ÷ $6 = 123.50×. After the increase, 29.64×. Against an average rise of 43% across the whole schedule and an agency that recovered 41% of its expenses from fees in FY2024, this one line is deliberately held at the floor. It is the cheapest thing the Office sells and the most expensive thing it makes.

Now the mechanism that turns a $6 form into a recurring product. § 201.38(c)(4): “A service provider’s designation will expire and become invalid three years after it is registered with the Office,” unless the provider amends or resubmits it, which “begins a new three-year period.” Nothing in the regulation obliges anyone to remind you. The 2016 rule that created the clock describes what happens next: the designation is labelled “terminated” in the directory, reactivation “will create a new version of the designation in the historical record,” and “the directory will show a gap in time between expiration and reactivation.” The gap is published. It is evidence against you, maintained by the government, for free.

Because the safe harbour does not reach backwards. In Oppenheimer v. Allvoices, Inc., No. C 14-00499 LB (N.D. Cal., 10 June 2014), Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler declined to let a provider’s late designation operate retroactively: a site that registered its agent roughly two months after the first infringing post could not invoke § 512 for the conduct before registration. A lapse is therefore not a pause. It is a permanently uninsured window, and the length of it is whatever the calendar says.

Price that window. 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(1) lets a copyright owner elect statutory damages “in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just,” per work; § 504(c)(2) raises wilful infringement to “not more than $150,000” and lowers innocent infringement to “not less than $200.” So the thing being switched off by a missed renewal is a cap that runs to $150,000 a work, and the thing that keeps it on costs $0.0055 a day.

How often is it missed? The Office has measured that too, and it is the only base rate anyone has. Preparing the 2016 rule it studied the old paper directory of roughly 23,300 designations, sampled 500 of them, and found that “approximately 70% either had inaccurate information or were for defunct service providers” — 110 of the 500 for providers that no longer existed, and of 370 checked against the provider’s own website, 241, about 65%, out of date. That is the decay rate of a registry with no expiry date. The three-year clock was the fix, and the fix converts one stale row into a stale row every thirty-six months.

Which is the business, and it is not a legal business. The directory is public, free, searchable and stamped with each designation’s date, so every row in it is a firm that has already proved it will pay for this and a deadline you can read three years in advance. The posted prices for standing in as agent of record are small and recurring: CopyByte lists $45 a year for a new site with no notices, $65 a year for up to ten notices a month, and $150 for three years under the line “Pay Once, Worry Once, Save 23%,” with “$10 per Notice Processed” and the promise that “only CopyByte’s address, phone, email and other contact information will be publicly visible.” InternetLegalAttorney posts $90 a year covering up to fifty takedowns, $75 for each further twenty-five, and $25 per listing update on top of the $6 — and warns that operators who list themselves “put their privacy at risk.” Both are selling the post-office-box problem back to the people the Office subsidises.

The timing is unusually sharp. NewsNet issue 1090 of 14 July 2026 records that the Office has submitted the proposed schedule to Congress under § 708(b), that Congress has 120 days to disapprove it by legislation, and that the Office “seeks to implement the fees in fall 2026” — the first change since 2020. If it lands, the one line nobody tracks goes up 316.67%, every three-year renewal reprices with it, and the float needed to pre-buy designations rises with it too: $500 buys 83 filings today and 20 afterwards.