For creators
That is what registration buys, and it costs about a minute. Register the work: your browser scans it, you choose your terms, and the registry holds the countersigned record. Crawlers get your answer, and use after the record is use of a work with a named owner.
In Bartz v. Anthropic, $1.5 billion settled across 482,460 registered works. Works outside the record were outside the payout.
The lesson is not the number. It is that payment, when it came, was paid against a record: named owners, identifiable works. The registry exists so that the next record is already there before the money moves.
Models retrain, new systems launch, and works are fetched and cited in generated answers every day. Use that predates your record is beyond reach, because no registration is retroactive. Use that follows it occurs against your name and your stated terms. When the $1.5 billion was distributed, it reached only the owners the court could identify from a record.
Litigation is expensive and its outcome uncertain. Selling a catalogue outright is irreversible. Blocking crawlers prevents the use and produces no revenue.
A registration adds a fourth position. You fingerprint the work in your browser, and the file never leaves your device. You state the declaration for the work: do not train, or use free with attribution. Use with attribution and metering is marked on the form as pending. The record carries the work, the owner, and the terms. Anyone holding the file can look it up. Free, and it takes about a minute.
In the European Union the position is settled. Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 permits commercial text and data mining unless the rights holder has expressly reserved it, and for work published online the Directive specifies machine-readable means as the way to reserve. Nothing obliges you to reserve. If you do not, mining your work is lawful. If you do, the reservation has to be readable by a machine at the moment the work is collected, which a copyright office certificate is not, in any country.
A file on your own server can carry that reservation, and where you control the domain it will. Most authors do not. Work published on LinkedIn, on Substack, or in a newspaper sits on a domain you cannot place anything at. A registry record attaches the reservation to the work rather than to the site.
This is the question we get most. An Alltio record is not a substitute for a copyright office, and a copyright office is not a substitute for an Alltio record. Neither one creates your copyright. That exists from the moment you fix the work. What each one creates is a different kind of evidence, readable by a different kind of reader.
Read by a court. A Copyright Office registration provides legal remedies in U.S. federal court. It carries a statutory fee, requires a deposit copy of the work, and takes months.
This is United States law. Most countries are Berne jurisdictions, where protection is automatic and there is no equivalent formality.
Register at copyright.gov →Read by a machine. A crawler or training pipeline resolves your fingerprint to your record at the moment it collects the work, and reads your terms there. A certificate cannot be read that way, in any country. In the EU, Article 4(3) makes an expressly reserved, machine-readable declaration the thing that preserves your rights against commercial text and data mining.
An Alltio record does not confer the legal remedies that registration does. We record, we do not adjudicate, and we are not a law firm.
Put a work on the record →One is what you take to a court after the fact. The other is what a machine reads before it takes the work. Doing one does not do the other, which is why we point you at copyright.gov rather than around it.
Your record page, at its own permanent web address — point anyone to it: an AI company, a lawyer, a licensing counterparty, a platform.
Your page embed — a small “Registered with Alltio” marker for your website or the end of an article, linking to the record.
Recognition — anyone holding the file you registered can scan it, get the same fingerprint, and find your record. Checking the registry is free for AI companies, permanently.
A versioned history — register a new version and the registry links it to the old one. The registry never edits a record silently; a chain of versions is evidence.
Today this serves written work: the file you registered is the file the record identifies, exactly. Photographs, video, and audio are different — every platform re-encodes them, so a circulating copy no longer matches an exact fingerprint. Serving them honestly needs a second kind of fingerprint, one that survives re-encoding. It has a reserved place in the registry’s design and is on the roadmap; until it ships, we do not claim it. Datasets, CAD and engineering files move as exact files between parties, so exact matching serves them today.
Settlement is not live. Registration and the record are. When the payments start, the record is what they’ll pay against.