The Copyright Statute of Limitations After Warner Chappell v. Nealy: Discovery, Separate Accrual, and How Far Back Damages Reach

In 1983, Sherman Nealy and Tony Butler started a small Miami music company called Music Specialist. It released one album and a few singles, and the partnership fell apart within a few years. Nealy went to prison on drug charges from 1989 to 2008, and again from 2012 to 2015. While he was away, according to his later lawsuit, Butler licensed the catalog to Warner Chappell Music without telling him. One song, "Jam the Box," was interpolated into Flo Rida's "In the Ayer," which reached No. 9 on the Billboard chart and was then licensed to television. Nealy said he learned about all of this in 2016. He sued in 2018, over licensing activity reaching back to 2008.

Ten years of infringement, then, under a statute that gives a plaintiff three. The Supreme Court heard the case and held that if Nealy's claims were timely, he could recover for all ten years. Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy, 601 U.S. 366 (2024). Then, in the same breath, the Court declined to say whether they were timely. Three Justices dissented to say that the Copyright Act "almost certainly does not tolerate" the rule that would make them timely, which would turn the majority's work into "a dead letter."

That is the odd state of American copyright's clock. The governing sentence is 23 words long, and it has been in the law since 1957. The Supreme Court has never decided what its last word means. Eleven federal courts of appeals have, and the Court has twice since Nealy refused to review them. So a song released in 1983, sampled in 2009, and sued on in 2026 may yield a claim worth nothing, or a claim worth seventeen years of profits, depending on facts most people never think to write down.

The short answer

• The period is three years from accrual. 17 U.S.C. § 507(b) says: "No civil action shall be maintained under the provisions of this title unless it is commenced within three years after the claim accrued."
• "Accrued" means discovery in almost every federal court, for now. Eleven circuits start the clock when the plaintiff discovered, or with due diligence should have discovered, the infringement. The D.C. Circuit has not decided. The Supreme Court has expressly left the question open, and three Justices think the answer is the injury rule, under which the clock starts when the infringing act happens.
• A timely claim carries all its damages. Nealy abolished the three-year damages bar that the Second Circuit had adopted. There is one clock, and it governs when to sue. It does not separately limit the money.
• Each infringing act is its own claim with its own clock. Under the separate-accrual rule from Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., 572 U.S. 663 (2014), old acts can be time-barred while new acts by the same defendant remain actionable. A later act does not drag the old ones back in.
• Ownership disputes work differently. A claim that turns on who owns the copyright accrues once, when ownership is plainly and expressly repudiated (or, in some circuits, when a reasonable person would have been on notice). Miss that window and any infringement claim that depends on the same ownership fight dies with it.
• "Should have discovered" is a fact question with teeth. A plaintiff's general sophistication does not start the clock. Michael Grecco Productions, Inc. v. RADesign, Inc., 112 F.4th 144 (2d Cir. 2024). But a plaintiff cannot ignore a media storm for thirty years either. Hayden v. Koons, No. 25-498-cv (2d Cir. July 21, 2026).
• Filing for registration does not stop the clock. Neither does a dismissed lawsuit. Tolling is narrow, and the plaintiff carries the burden of showing it.
• Timely does not mean rich. If the infringement commenced before registration, 17 U.S.C. § 412 takes statutory damages and fees off the table, which is often the real money in a small case.
• Unsettled: whether the discovery rule survives at the Supreme Court; whether an image left on a server is one infringement or many; whether DMCA claims follow the separate-accrual rule; and the precise test for repudiation.

Why copyright has a federal clock at all

Before 1957, copyright law had no limitations period for civil suits. Federal courts borrowed from state statutes, which ranged from one to eight years, and plaintiffs shopped accordingly. Congress fixed that with a single uniform period, now codified at § 507(b). The Court in Petrella gave those two purposes as the reasons for the statute: to make the time for suit uniform and certain, and to stop the forum shopping that disparate state periods invited. 572 U.S. at 670.

The drafting history produced one more durable idea. A committee report said the statute was meant to reach the remedy, and it contemplated that equitable considerations could suspend the period. The Fifth Circuit read that passage in 1971 to mean general federal equity principles, because importing each state's local tolling doctrine would defeat the point of a national statute. Prather v. Neva Paperbacks, Inc., 446 F.2d 338 (5th Cir. 1971). That reasoning still explains why a Florida "blameless ignorance" doctrine, or any other state-law tolling rule, does not control a copyright case.

Three scope points catch people out:

• "This title" is broad. Section 507(b) applies to civil actions "under the provisions of this title," which covers Title 17's other causes of action, including anti-circumvention and copyright-management-information claims under 17 U.S.C. § 1203. The Ninth Circuit applied the same period to a DMCA claim in Media Rights Technologies, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 922 F.3d 1014 (9th Cir. 2019).
• The government has a different statute. Infringement by or for the United States goes to the Court of Federal Claims under 28 U.S.C. § 1498(b), whose text says "no recovery shall be had for any infringement" committed more than three years before the complaint, while excluding the time an administrative claim was pending. Congress knows how to write a damages cutoff when it wants one, which is a useful thing to point out to anyone arguing that § 507(b) contains one too.
• The Copyright Claims Board has its own parallel rule. A board proceeding must be commenced within three years after the claim accrued, and it tolls the district court clock while pending. 17 U.S.C. § 1504(b). For the mechanics, see The Copyright Claims Board: Small Claims Copyright Litigation Under the CASE Act.

For the general theory of accrual across practice areas, read Statutes of Limitations, Accrual, and Tolling: The Clock That Ends Most Claims. The rest of this article is about the ways copyright departs from it.

Three questions hiding in one sentence

Most confusion about this statute comes from running three different questions together.

Nealy answered only the third question, and only in part. The second one remains the battleground.

Injury rule or discovery rule: the textual fight

Under the injury rule, a claim accrues when the wrong happens, whether or not anyone knows about it. Under the discovery rule, it accrues when the plaintiff discovers the wrong or, with due diligence, should have. The difference matters most in the exact case the statute's drafters probably did not picture: a work being exploited quietly, far from the owner's view, for many years.

The argument for the injury rule starts with the Supreme Court's general presumption. A claim ordinarily accrues when the plaintiff has "a complete and present cause of action." Petrella, 572 U.S. at 670. The Court said in TRW Inc. v. Andrews, 534 U.S. 19 (2001) that the discovery rule does not apply across all contexts, and it has treated fraud and concealment as the rule's traditional home. In Rotkiske v. Klemm, 589 U.S. 8 (2019), interpreting the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, Justice Thomas called the expansive approach to the discovery rule "a 'bad wine of recent vintage,'" quoting Justice Scalia's concurrence in TRW. In Gabelli v. SEC, 568 U.S. 442 (2013), the Court refused a discovery rule for government penalty actions. And Petrella itself contains the sentence defendants quote most: "A copyright claim thus arises or 'accrue[s]' when an infringing act occurs." 572 U.S. at 670.

The argument for the discovery rule starts with the words of the statute and their neighbors. Section 507 has two subsections. 17 U.S.C. § 507(a) gives prosecutors five years "after the cause of action arose." Section 507(b) gives civil plaintiffs three years "after the claim accrued." The Third Circuit put weight on that difference in William A. Graham Co. v. Haughey, 568 F.3d 425 (3d Cir. 2009). Six years before Congress wrote § 507(b), the Supreme Court had read "cause of action arises" in the Admiralty Act as embodying the injury rule. So, the argument goes, Congress knew what "arose" meant and used a different word for civil suits. The Second Circuit then rejected the injury rule in Psihoyos v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 748 F.3d 120 (2d Cir. 2014), concluding that the Copyright Act's text and structure, unlike the Fair Credit Reporting Act's in TRW, show an intent to use discovery.

There are policy arguments on both sides as well. A photographer cannot sue over a use in a regional textbook she has never seen. Then again, copyright terms run for generations, and a discovery rule with no outer limit means a defendant's exposure for a use in 1989 may first surface in 2021 with the witnesses dead and the files gone. Congress could fix this in a sentence. It has not.

The appellate count is not close. Besides the Second and Third Circuits, the discovery rule is law in the First (Warren Freedenfeld Associates, Inc. v. McTigue, 531 F.3d 38 (1st Cir. 2008)), Fourth (Lyons Partnership, L.P. v. Morris Costumes, Inc., 243 F.3d 789 (4th Cir. 2001)), Fifth (Graper v. Mid-Continent Casualty Co., 756 F.3d 388 (5th Cir. 2014)), Sixth (Roger Miller Music, Inc. v. Sony/ATV Publishing, LLC, 477 F.3d 383 (6th Cir. 2007)), Seventh (Gaiman v. McFarlane, 360 F.3d 644 (7th Cir. 2004)), Eighth (Comcast of Illinois X v. Multi-Vision Electronics, Inc., 491 F.3d 938 (8th Cir. 2007)), Ninth (Starz Entertainment, LLC v. MGM Domestic Television Distribution, LLC, 39 F.4th 1236 (9th Cir. 2022)), Tenth (Diversey v. Schmidly, 738 F.3d 1196 (10th Cir. 2013)), and, as the courts count it, the Eleventh (Webster v. Dean Guitars, 955 F.3d 1270 (11th Cir. 2020)). For an entry point to the older scholarship, Rémy Y. Chang's note Rejecting Auscape International v. National Geographic Society for a Uniform Civil Copyright Lawsuit Discovery Rule of Accrual, 44 U.C. Davis Law Review 1381 (2011), and John Ramirez's Discovering Injury? The Confused State of the Statute of Limitations for Federal Copyright Infringement, 17 Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal 1125 (2007), both trace how the circuits got here. The standing references are Nimmer on Copyright § 12.05, which the courts in this area cite constantly, Patry on Copyright § 20:19, and the annotation at 140 A.L.R. Fed. 641.

Petrella: the separate-accrual rule and the end of laches as a bar

Frank Petrella wrote a screenplay with the boxer Jake LaMotta, registered in 1963. MGM's Raging Bull followed in 1980. Frank died in 1981, during the initial copyright term, so the renewal rights passed to his heirs free of his earlier assignment. His daughter Paula renewed in 1991. Her lawyer wrote to MGM in 1998. They exchanged letters for two years. Then nothing happened until January 6, 2009, when she sued. She conceded she could recover nothing for acts before January 6, 2006.

MGM argued laches, the equitable defense for unreasonable, prejudicial delay. The lower courts agreed: eighteen years is a long time, she admitted she had waited because the film "hadn't made money," and MGM had invested heavily. The Supreme Court reversed, 6 to 3, and in doing so laid down the two rules that still structure the field.

The separate-accrual rule. "Each time an infringing work is reproduced or distributed, the infringer commits a new wrong. Each wrong gives rise to a discrete 'claim' that 'accrue[s]' at the time the wrong occurs. In short, each infringing act starts a new limitations period." 572 U.S. at 671. The rule cuts both ways. A plaintiff who has known about an infringement for decades can still sue over last month's copies. And the defendant is "insulated from liability for earlier infringements of the same work." Id. The Court's footnote adds a distinction that has become important online: "Separately accruing harm should not be confused with harm from past violations that are continuing." Id. at 671 n.6. The Second Circuit had said the core of this decades earlier in Stone v. Williams, 970 F.2d 1043 (2d Cir. 1992), the Hank Williams heir case: each act of infringement is a distinct harm giving rise to an independent claim.

No laches against damages. Congress had set the period, and laches is a gap-filler for when it has not. Courts "are not at liberty to jettison Congress' judgment on the timeliness of suit." Id. at 667. The Court was untroubled by the plaintiff who waits to see if the defendant's project pays off. "It is hardly incumbent on copyright owners . . . to challenge each and every actionable infringement," and the statute "allows a copyright owner to defer suit until she can estimate whether litigation is worth the candle." Id. at 682-83.

Three safety valves remain, and practitioners should keep them straight. In extraordinary circumstances, delay can curtail equitable relief at the threshold. The Court's example was Chirco v. Crosswinds Communities, Inc., 474 F.3d 227 (6th Cir. 2007), where the plaintiffs watched a housing development go up and then sought destruction of homes people had moved into. Delay can also shape injunctive relief and the assessment of the infringer's profits at the remedial stage. And estoppel remains fully available as a complete defense where the owner made intentionally misleading representations about not suing and the defendant detrimentally relied. Id. at 684-85. The test is harder than laches, and delay is not an element. For the wider picture of these doctrines, see Understanding Equitable Defenses: A Comprehensive Guide to Laches, Acquiescence, Waiver, and Equitable Estoppel, and for the constitutional argument that preceded Petrella, Ryan Christopher Locke's note Resetting the Doomsday Clock, 6 Buffalo Intellectual Property Law Journal 133 (2009).

Footnote 4 of Petrella is the seed of everything that followed. "Although we have not passed on the question, nine Courts of Appeals have adopted, as an alternative to the incident of injury rule, a 'discovery rule.'" Petrella had known about MGM for years, so the question did not arise. But the opinion's body also said, in describing how § 507(b) worked on her facts, that the statute "allows plaintiffs during that lengthy term to gain retrospective relief running only three years back from the date the complaint was filed." Id. at 672. Defendants read that sentence as a holding about damages in every case.

Sohm and the damages bar that lasted four years

In Sohm v. Scholastic Inc., 959 F.3d 39 (2d Cir. 2020), a photographer sued Scholastic for exceeding the scope of its licenses to use his pictures. Scholastic could not show facts that should have prompted an audit, and the Second Circuit held that it "cannot rely on the passage of time alone" to prove earlier constructive discovery. So the discovery rule made the claims timely. Then the panel took Petrella at its most literal: whatever the accrual rule, it said, the Court had "explicitly delimited damages to the three years prior to the commencement of a copyright infringement action." Timely claim, no money for the old years.

Note how strange that combination is. A plaintiff could win the right to sue over a 2009 infringement and collect nothing for it.

The Ninth Circuit refused to go along in Starz Entertainment, LLC v. MGM Domestic Television Distribution, LLC, 39 F.4th 1236 (9th Cir. 2022). Starz had paid about $70 million for exclusive streaming windows in hundreds of MGM titles. In August 2019 a Starz employee noticed Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on Amazon Prime Video during Starz's exclusive period. Investigation turned up more. Starz sued in May 2020, and MGM argued that Petrella capped damages at three years back. The panel said the Petrella language was dictum about a case in which the discovery rule played no part, and that the discovery rule was "alive and well." The court was building on its older holding in Polar Bear Productions, Inc. v. Timex Corp., 384 F.3d 700 (9th Cir. 2004), which had already allowed damages outside the three-year window for an owner who could not reasonably have discovered the infringement sooner. The Eleventh Circuit joined the Ninth in Nealy v. Warner Chappell Music, Inc., 60 F.4th 1325 (11th Cir. 2023), reasoning that a damages bar "would gut the discovery rule." That was the split the Supreme Court took.

Warner Chappell v. Nealy, read closely

The most important thing about Nealy is how narrowly the Court drew it. Warner Chappell's petition had mentioned the discovery rule only in a footnote and conceded that the issue had not been raised below and was not the subject of a circuit split. The Court then rewrote the question presented to read: "[w]hether, under the discovery accrual rule applied by the circuit courts," a copyright plaintiff "can recover damages for acts that allegedly occurred more than three years before the filing of a lawsuit." When Warner Chappell nonetheless spent almost its whole brief attacking the discovery rule, Justice Kagan's opinion responded with a pointed footnote: the reformulation "should have put an end to such arguments."

What the majority held

The analysis takes barely two pages, because the text does the work. Section 507(b) "establishes a three-year period for filing suit, beginning to run when a claim accrues." And "that clock is a singular one." If any time limit on damages exists, it must come from the remedial sections. But those state "without qualification" that an infringer is liable for statutory damages or for actual damages and profits. "There is no time limit on monetary recovery. So a copyright owner possessing a timely claim for infringement is entitled to damages, no matter when the infringement occurred." Id. at 372.

The Second Circuit's contrary rule, the majority said, was "essentially self-defeating." It gave with one hand and took with the other, making the discovery rule "functionally equivalent to its opposite number." Scholars had speculated about exceptional cases in which a discovery rule plus a damages bar might still do some good. "Suffice to say that assuming those cases exist at all, they are as rare as hen's teeth."

As for the Petrella sentence, the Court said it merely described how the statute works when a plaintiff "has no timely claims for infringing acts more than three years old." Petrella knew about the film; she could sue only for recent acts; so she could recover only for recent acts. Sohm's damages holding is abrogated, as the Second Circuit has since acknowledged in Hayden, while its discovery-rule holding stands. For an academic treatment of the decision, see Dale P. Olson, Parsing Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy, 66 IDEA 458 (2026).

What the majority did not hold

The Court said repeatedly that it was assuming and not deciding. "We have never decided whether that assumption is valid." Id. at 371. The issue was not properly presented, because Warner Chappell had accepted the rule below. And the Court noted, in the sentence plaintiffs now quote, that the Courts of Appeals applying a copyright discovery rule stand at "11 at last count."

The dissent

Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito, would have dismissed the case as improvidently granted. He opened by saying the Court "sidesteps the logically antecedent question," and that "the Act almost certainly does not tolerate a discovery rule." The reasoning runs in a straight line from Petrella's general statement of accrual, through TRW and Rotkiske, to a conclusion about the statute: standard language calls for the standard rule, Nealy alleged no fraud or concealment, and so the discovery rule "has no role to play here," or "in the mine run of copyright cases." "Better, in my view, to answer a question that does matter than one that almost certainly does not."

Read that as a roadmap. If the Court ever takes the question and adopts the injury rule, Nealy would still be correct and would almost never matter. Every plaintiff would be in Paula Petrella's position, reaching back three years from filing, unless tolling for fraud or concealment applied. The law of who can recover for an old infringement would change overnight.

What has happened since

The Court has kept its distance. It denied certiorari in Hearst Newspapers, L.L.C. v. Martinelli, No. 23-474, on May 20, 2024, just eleven days after Nealy. That petition squarely asked the discovery rule question, on clean stipulated facts: in Martinelli v. Hearst Newspapers, L.L.C., 65 F.4th 231 (5th Cir. 2023), Hearst stipulated that the photographer could not with reasonable diligence have found the web articles earlier. The Fifth Circuit had held only that Petrella and Rotkiske had not unequivocally overruled its precedent. The Court then denied RADesign, Inc. v. Michael Grecco Productions, Inc., No. 24-768, on June 16, 2025, despite an amicus brief from eight NBA teams (the Pacers, Nuggets, Timberwolves, Pelicans, Magic, Trail Blazers, Kings, and Spurs) supporting review. A denial of certiorari decides nothing, and nobody should read these as approval. A clean vehicle plus a real circuit split would look different, but so far the split does not exist.

The Seventh Circuit declined to reconsider. In Motorola Solutions, Inc. v. Hytera Communications Corp., 108 F.4th 458 (7th Cir. 2024), Hytera had taken Motorola's source code, including its bugs, which turned up in the same spots in Hytera's products. Hytera asked the panel to overrule the circuit's old discovery-rule case, Taylor v. Meirick, 712 F.2d 1112 (7th Cir. 1983), after Nealy. The court said Nealy "was careful to leave the discovery rule intact" and refused "[w]ithout a Supreme Court mandate" to depart from its own precedent and ten other circuits. Motorola could recover for all violations it discovered in the three years before it added the copyright claims, which it did by amendment in August 2018. That last detail is a quiet warning: the court measured from when the copyright claims entered the case, and not from the earlier trade secret complaint.

The Second Circuit rejected the "sophisticated plaintiff" exception. Grecco began with a photographer who advertised his own enforcement savvy in his complaint, alleging that he "spends time and money to actively search for hard-to-detect infringements." The defendants' use began in August 2017. He said he discovered it on February 8, 2021, and sued in October 2021. The district court dismissed, reasoning that a plaintiff this experienced should have found it sooner. The Second Circuit vacated. Its opinion is worth reading for three distinct points. It corrected the math: the question was whether he should have discovered the use before October 12, 2018 (three years before filing), and not within three years of when the infringement began, which would simply be the injury rule in costume. It said the discovery rule is the rule of accrual, and is not an equitable exception that only some plaintiffs earn: the Act employs one rule for everybody. And it held that a statute of limitations remains an affirmative defense: "a likelihood, even a high one, that claims are untimely is not enough to make it 'clear' that they are." Applying the ruling in a parallel case she had stayed to await it, the same district judge refused to dismiss on the argument that a photographer's earlier suits over the same photograph put her on notice. Lixenberg v. Complex Media, Inc., No. 1:22-cv-00354 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 29, 2025).

The First Circuit found the limits of the theory on hosted video. Foss v. Eastern States Exposition, No. 24-1360 (1st Cir. Aug. 21, 2025) is the case to read if you handle online uses. An artist alleged that a fair operator posted marketing videos showing her work online in 2016 and 2017. Her own earlier complaints showed she knew about them by early 2017, and she filed the operative suit in December 2020. The court held the claim untimely and rejected a set of ingenious arguments, discussed below.

The Second Circuit defined constructive discovery in a very memorable case. In Hayden, a set designer sold a Styrofoam serpent sculpture to an Italian production company in 1988 for about $900. A year later Jeff Koons posed on it with Ilona Staller for the Made in Heaven series. Those works became, in the plaintiff's own words, a "media sensation and scandal." The designer lived in Italy until 2007, spoke the language, read the papers, and knew Staller's company. He said he first saw the images in 2019, and he sued in December 2021. The court affirmed summary judgment for Koons as a matter of law. More on that shortly.

The Sixth Circuit tightened repudiation. Estate of George Worrell, Jr. v. Thang, Inc., No. 25-1863 (6th Cir. May 27, 2026), decided in May 2026 and recommended for publication, is the leading new ownership case. It appears in the ownership discussion below.

District courts keep the question alive. A D.D.C. judge noted that the rule remains open in the Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit, recorded that every other regional circuit has adopted it, and refused to dismiss on the injury rule at the pleading stage. Olson v. Law Offices of Paul Garrity, (D.D.C. May 25, 2026).

The Eleventh Circuit asterisk

The eleven-circuit count contains a soft spot that practitioners in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia should know. Webster, the case usually cited for the Eleventh Circuit, was an ownership dispute. The panel in Nealy described "two recognized rules" for accrual and assumed the discovery rule applied, without adopting it across the board. A Middle District of Florida court has written that the Eleventh Circuit "has not explicitly adopted either the discovery rule or the injury rule in the civil copyright infringement context," in a passage quoted by Global Weather Productions, LLC v. Wood Projections, Inc., No. 1:24-cv-23528 (S.D. Fla. Jan. 5, 2026), while noting that Florida's federal courts routinely apply the discovery rule. And McClatchy Co. v. EBSCO Information Services Inc., No. 2:24-cv-01076 (N.D. Ala. May 28, 2025) read those decisions to apply the discovery rule when ownership is the gravamen and the injury rule to "ordinary" infringement claims. The Supreme Court itself described the discovery rule as "used in the Circuit where Nealy sued." Do not assume this is settled in that circuit, and plead and argue both ways.

What "should have discovered" actually requires

Under the discovery rule, the plaintiff's actual knowledge starts the clock. So does constructive discovery, the point at which a reasonably diligent owner would have found the infringement. Almost all the real litigation concerns the second. The circuits use somewhat different vocabulary.

Hayden is now the most developed treatment. The plaintiff argued for a securities-style standard: the clock could start only once he had actual knowledge of "storm warnings" suggesting infringement was probable. The panel said no. Relying on Merck & Co. v. Reynolds, 559 U.S. 633 (2010), it held that inquiry notice and constructive discovery are different things, and requiring actual knowledge of the warning signs would make constructive discovery a nullity. The court was careful in both directions: "We do not expect a reasonable copyright holder to scour the news, comb through the internet, or keep apprised of pop culture." But "the discovery rule does not allow plaintiffs to bury their heads in the sand, ignore widespread international media coverage of allegedly infringing art, and then sue for potential infringement some thirty years later."

The facts doing the work were specific: decades in Italy overlapping with the scandal, fluency, consumption of local news, direct dealings with Staller's company, the fame of both subjects, and the plaintiff's own complaint, which the court treated as a binding judicial admission when it called the works a sensation. That last point deserves its own sentence on a lawyer's checklist. The more a complaint glorifies how famous the defendant's use was, the more it proves the plaintiff should have seen it.

Oracle offers the other side of constructive notice, in a software setting. Oracle alleged that Hewlett Packard Enterprise and a contractor were improperly downloading and installing Solaris operating system patches on servers without Oracle support contracts. The Ninth Circuit held Oracle's arguments about lack of actual knowledge beside the point, because it had enough information to suspect the conduct and did not reasonably investigate. "[E]quity will impute" what the investigation would have shown. A company with reason to suspect is held to what a reasonable follow-up would have found.

A worked example: the 2009 sample of the 1983 song

Suppose Odell Prewitt wrote and recorded a song called "Tidewater Stomp" in 1983 for a small Gulf Coast label he co-owned. In 2009, a producer samples its bass line for a track called "Neon Harbor." The label's surviving partner signed a license. The track sells modestly on download stores, then a streaming bump in 2021 makes real money. Prewitt registers his copyright and sues in March 2026. All facts below are invented.

The money turns on more than the clock. Prewitt registered in 2026, so 17 U.S.C. § 410(c) gives him no presumption of validity (the certificate must be made within five years of first publication), and 17 U.S.C. § 412 bars statutory damages and fees because the infringement commenced long before registration. He gets actual damages and the defendants' profits attributable to the infringement, and they will argue that a bass line is a small slice of a hit. For registration timing on songs, see Understanding Copyright Registration for a Song: A Comprehensive Guide for Bands, and for how streaming money flows, Music Licensing in the Streaming Era: Mechanical Royalties, the MLC, and Direct Licensing Deals.

Separate accrual meets the server: when did the infringement occur?

Petrella speaks of works being "reproduced or distributed." Online, the mechanics do not map neatly onto that sentence. A lawyer who has never watched a web request happen is at a disadvantage here, so here is what actually occurs.

When someone adds a photo to a website, the content management system writes a copy of the file to storage, often an object store such as a cloud bucket. That write is a reproduction under 17 U.S.C. § 106. A content delivery network, a set of caching servers around the world, may make further copies at its edge locations as traffic requests them. Nothing further happens on the server until a browser asks. Then the browser sends a request for the file's address; the server, or a cache, responds with the bytes; the browser builds the image on screen. Each of those responses is a transmission, and under 17 U.S.C. § 101 a display can be made public by transmission.

Between requests, the file just sits there. Nothing is being copied or sent. Yet the page's owner is doing something in a loose sense, because its server stands ready to serve the file to anyone who asks.

The Ninth Circuit's "server test" from Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir. 2007) treats the party whose server stores the image and communicates it as the one displaying it; Hunley v. Instagram, LLC, 73 F.4th 1060 (9th Cir. 2023) reaffirmed the test, so that someone merely embedding an image hosted elsewhere does not display it in that circuit. A Southern District of New York judge rejected the test for embedding in Goldman v. Breitbart News Network, LLC, 302 F. Supp. 3d 585 (S.D.N.Y. 2018), and Bell v. Wilmott Storage Services, LLC, 12 F.4th 1065 (9th Cir. 2021) shows how far the logic can go. Wilmott Storage bought a travel website whose server held a copy of an Indianapolis skyline photo, filed under a Mobile, Alabama address. The company said it did not know the photo was there until the owner complained in 2018. It removed the photo from the original address, yet a year later a copy sat at a slightly different one. The image was reachable only by someone with the exact URL or someone running a reverse image search. The Ninth Circuit still held that this was public display because the "server was continuously transmitting the image" to anyone who used those routes. So deleting a page, or one copy, may not end the infringement. For limitations purposes, that matters: the last infringing act may be later than anybody at the company thinks.

Three theories follow, and no court of appeals has chosen among them.

1. One act, continuing harm. The upload is the wrong, and the later availability is its lingering effect. This reading draws on Petrella's footnote 6 and works in the defendant's favor. Foss leaned this way, observing that the argument that posts were infringing displays "until they were taken down" "would seem to identify a continuing harm" from the original decision to post.
2. A new wrong every day. The plaintiff in Foss made this argument in her reply brief and at oral argument, citing Bell: each day online restarts the period. The First Circuit held the argument waived and did not decide it. An argument raised that late rarely gets a merits ruling, and this one is still waiting for a proper vehicle.
3. A new wrong on each transmission. This is the most literal application of the server test. If each response to a request is a display, each is a discrete act, provable by server logs. It creates a nearly limitless clock for anything still online, but it requires evidence of actual requests within the window, unless a court accepts a Bell-type readiness theory. Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 118 F.3d 199 (4th Cir. 1997) gives this theory an analog. The Fourth Circuit held that a library distributes a work by holding an unauthorized copy in its collection, listing it in the catalog, and making it available to the public, and that the owner need not prove actual patrons, because an infringer should not benefit from failing to keep records. Hotaling was a limitations case at heart, because the Church's copying ended in 1991 and only the holding-out fell in the window. Its making-available reading of the distribution right has drawn sharp disagreement elsewhere, so treat it as an argument and not a settled rule.

What is settled is the negative. A later act does not revive earlier ones. The Seventh Circuit said in Chicago Building Design, P.C. v. Mongolian House, Inc., 770 F.3d 610 (7th Cir. 2014) that Petrella means the continuing-violation doctrine does not apply here, though its specific holding was that uses of infringing blueprints inside the window (including at building inspections) were independently actionable. The Ninth Circuit had rejected continuing-infringement sweep long before, in the Roley line that Polar Bear discusses. And the Fourth Circuit's Hotaling described the prevailing view: no reaching back from timely acts to recover for untimely ones.

Software and other copy-on-use systems

Software generates infringing acts constantly and invisibly, so separate accrual tends to keep a claim alive, while discovery fights center on what the owner should have noticed.

• Installation and deployment. Each install, container image build, or server deployment that copies protected code without authority is a reproduction. A company that keeps spinning up instances keeps committing new acts.
• License overuse. Exceeding seat counts or scope can be both a breach and an infringement. The contract claim has its own state limitations period and accrual rule; the copyright claim has § 507(b). A licensor with real reason to suspect overuse who did nothing looks like Oracle. A licensor with no such reason looks like Sohm, whose licensee could not win by pointing out that he never ran an audit.
• Source code in the product. Motorola shows that hidden source-code copying can stretch the reach of a timely claim very far. Hytera's engineers had even modified the code to conceal its origin. Compilation hides copying from the outside world, which is why these cases so often turn on discovery dates.
• Downstream copies. Every customer running infringing firmware may be a separate infringer, and the vendor's liability may be secondary. For how that liability works, see Contributory and Vicarious Copyright Liability After Cox v. Sony: Who Pays When Someone Else Infringes.

A worked example: the old blog photo

Suppose a dental practice in Spokane hired a marketing freelancer in 2018, and the freelancer put a stock-looking photo of a smiling couple on the practice's blog. Anneke Rowe, a commercial photographer, took that photo in 2016 and registered it in 2017. In 2026 the practice receives a demand from a licensing agent asking for $9,500. Its office manager says the blog was redesigned in 2022 and the post is gone. All of this is invented.

Start with the server. Is the file gone, or just the page? If the 2018 upload still sits in the old media library at a stable URL, Bell gives Rowe an argument that display continues in the Ninth Circuit. Washington is in the Ninth Circuit. Now the rule. If everything truly ended in 2022, any suit must rest on the discovery rule, because all the acts are more than three years old by 2026. So Rowe must say when and how she found it. If her agent's image-matching crawler flagged the page in 2020 and sat on it, the claim is dead: the agent's knowledge is likely to be imputed to her. If she found it in 2025 and the practice has no facts about her monitoring, then under Grecco (persuasive authority in Washington) the case is unlikely to end on the pleadings, though the practice can seek discovery about what tools she was using, how often, and what they found. Registration before the use means § 412 does not bar statutory damages, so the case has real settlement value even for a modest use.

This is why demand letters in old-post cases tend to be vague about discovery dates, and why the first thing an accused business should ask for is that date. For the rest of the response, read Image Copyright Demand Letters: How Photo Licensing Enforcement Works and What Claims Are Really Worth and Responding to an Image Copyright Infringement Demand: A Practical Guide. For the takedown side, see How to File a DMCA Takedown Notice (And Respond to One).

DMCA claims

Claims for removing or falsifying copyright management information under 17 U.S.C. § 1202 travel with these image cases, and their accrual is unsettled. In Hayden the plaintiff argued that a false credit on Koons's website was a new, independently accruing wrong. The court declined to reach the argument as unpreserved and undeveloped, and flagged the question as open: the Ninth Circuit said in Media Rights that "there is no parallel separate-accrual rule" for the DMCA claim in that case, an anti-circumvention claim under § 1201, while a Southern District of New York judge had noted no court had refused to apply it under § 1202. If your theory depends on this, brief it fully, in the district court.

Ownership claims: one clock, one time

The discussion so far assumes the plaintiff's ownership is not really disputed. When it is, a different rule governs, and it is far less forgiving.

The foundational cases came out of the music business. In Merchant v. Levy, 92 F.3d 51 (2d Cir. 1996), two members of the Teenagers claimed co-authorship of "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," written in 1955 and registered without their names. They sued in 1987. A jury found they were co-authors. The Second Circuit reversed, holding that plaintiffs claiming to be co-authors are time-barred three years after accrual "from seeking a declaration of copyright co-ownership rights and any remedies that would flow from such a declaration." In Zuill v. Shanahan, 80 F.3d 1366 (9th Cir. 1996), decided the same year, the Ninth Circuit coined the phrase that now dominates the field: co-ownership claims accrue "when plain and express repudiation of co-ownership is communicated to the claimant," they accrue only once, and it is "inequitable to allow the putative co-owner to lie in the weeds for years after his claim has been repudiated . . . and then pounce on the prize." The reasoning draws on adverse possession: an ouster of a co-tenant by an unequivocal act of ownership.

Why plaintiffs cannot dress up the claim

Courts look to the gravamen. In Kwan v. Schlein, 634 F.3d 224 (2d Cir. 2011), an editor insisted she had ghostwritten a book. She objected to her credit in December 1998, the publisher listed her as editor in January 1999, she cashed royalty checks, and she sued years later about the third and fourth editions, which were new enough to fall within the three years. The Second Circuit held that a time-barred ownership claim bars an infringement claim that "cannot be decided without adjudication of a genuine dispute" over ownership. Seven Arts Filmed Entertainment Ltd. v. Content Media Corp., 733 F.3d 1251 (9th Cir. 2013) adopted the same rule in a film-rights fight, reasoning that otherwise anyone could evade the ownership bar by restyling the claim as infringement. The Eleventh Circuit followed in Webster v. Dean Guitars, 955 F.3d 1270 (11th Cir. 2020), where a guitar maker's claim to the lightning-storm graphic on Pantera guitarist Darrell Abbott's guitar died on a 2007 email from the Dean CEO saying the consensus was that Abbott's estate owned it. The email was "certainly sufficient," the panel said, and the 2017 suit came years too late.

The bar reaches defenses too, at least where the defense is the same claim in different clothes. In Garza v. Everly, 59 F.4th 876 (6th Cir. 2023), the Sixth Circuit held that Phil Everly's estate could not raise his co-authorship of "Cathy's Clown" as a defense to Don Everly's declaratory action, once Phil's claim had long since been repudiated. The panel said authorship might be raised defensively in other contexts, but not in a contest over who owns the rights to the song and its profits.

What counts as repudiation

Here is where the circuits diverge, though less than the labels suggest. The Sixth and Ninth Circuits speak of "plain and express repudiation." Other circuits ask when a reasonably diligent plaintiff would have been put on inquiry, or should as a reasonable person have learned of the violation, with express repudiation being sufficient. Webster adopted that reasonable-person approach for the Eleventh Circuit, counting the First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh on the same side. The Sixth Circuit mapped the field in Everly v. Everly, 958 F.3d 442 (6th Cir. 2020), observing that the inquiry-notice cases have nearly all turned on express repudiation anyway, and Worrell collects later decisions from the Second, Seventh, and Tenth Circuits using the repudiation language. See Horror Inc. v. Miller, 15 F.4th 232 (2d Cir. 2021); Cooper v. NCS Pearson, Inc., 733 F.3d 1013 (10th Cir. 2013). The Third Circuit has its own version in Brownstein v. Lindsay, 742 F.3d 55 (3d Cir. 2014).

Wilson adds a point that matters for pre-1978 works. The renewal term is a new estate. Repudiating a claimant's rights in the original term does not automatically repudiate the renewal term, so a defendant needs fresh repudiation or notice after the renewal vested.

Worrell is now the most careful treatment of the contract problem. Bernie Worrell, the keyboardist of Parliament-Funkadelic, was party to what looked like a 1976 agreement exchanging ownership of recordings for royalties. For decades, he and George Clinton's company fought about unpaid royalties. They audited, sued, and settled under the agreement. Then in a 2019 state suit by his estate, Thang, Inc. successfully defended on the ground that the agreement was never countersigned, denying it in 2020. The estate turned around and sued for co-ownership. The district court held the claim long barred: no credit, no royalties, decades of notice. The Sixth Circuit reversed, finding a genuine dispute over when ownership was repudiated, at least for recordings within the purported agreement. Everly's three routes to repudiation, it said, are circumstances under which a claim "may be repudiated," and they are not per se tests. A fight over a contract "may not necessarily" alert anyone to a challenge to his copyright. While both sides treated the agreement as binding, non-payment looked like a breach and not an ouster. To borrow an analogy the opinion itself does not draw, a tenant who stops paying rent does not thereby claim to own the building. Only the 2020 denial arguably put ownership itself in issue. Worrell also drew from Gaiman the point that ownership of a copyright is distinct from a contract right to royalties.

Strangers to the dispute

The ownership rule was built for co-authors and those in close relationships. Does a defendant with no relationship to the plaintiff get its benefit? Ritchie v. Williams, 395 F.3d 283 (6th Cir. 2005) said the ordinary each-act rule applies to claims against an unknown third party, while extending repudiation to those who transfer rights by contract. Seven Arts expressly left open "which rule applies to suits against unknown third parties," finding Paramount in a close enough relationship through a first-look deal and distribution. So a downstream licensee can usually argue it stands in its licensor's shoes, but this is an open front in many courts. A careful plaintiff will expect the question and a careful defendant will trace chain of title to the earliest repudiation. For the substantive ownership rules, see Copyright Ownership, Joint Authorship, and Termination of Transfers and Copyright Termination and Reversion: Sections 203 and 304 and Taking Back a Grant, and note that termination fights often raise these same timing questions, as in Exercising or Defending a Copyright Termination: A Practical Guide.

A point on who is suing whom

Ownership limitations can protect a company that wants certainty. The accused party, or a business partner, can force the issue by sending a repudiation letter, which starts the clock against the recipient, or by seeking a declaration under 28 U.S.C. § 2201. Petrella itself mentions the protection a declaratory judgment action might have given MGM. The working papers for both tactics are in Copyright Timeliness Toolkit: Accrual Chronologies, Tolling Agreements, and Limitations Motions.

Tolling: narrower than plaintiffs hope

Discovery is not tolling. Grecco insists on this. The discovery rule sets when the claim accrues; tolling is an equitable pause after accrual. Equitable tolling is still available in appropriate cases. Grecco said so, and Petrella noted that tolling applies because it is "a rule of interpretation" tied to a statute of limitations, drawing on Holmberg v. Armbrecht, 327 U.S. 392 (1946).

Fraudulent concealment. This is the classic ground, and if the Court ever adopts the injury rule it would become the main surviving escape route. In Taylor, the defendant put his own copyright notice on maps he had copied, "an action calculated to obstruct any inquiry," and Judge Posner said that would toll the statute. Stone held that concealment tolls only until a reasonably diligent plaintiff could have known, regardless of the fraud. In Prather, the plaintiff bore the burden of showing tolling, and a discovery response that omitted a book but was corrected later was not enough.

Pending registration does not help. Registration is a precondition to suit under 17 U.S.C. § 411(a) and Reed Elsevier, Inc. v. Muchnick, 559 U.S. 154 (2010), and Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com, LLC, 586 U.S. 296 (2019) held that it occurs when the Copyright Office acts, not when the application goes in. Plaintiffs reasoned that if they cannot sue until registration, the claim cannot accrue until registration. Foss rejected that: it would let a plaintiff lengthen the clock by delaying filing, and neither Nealy nor Fourth Estate suggests anything but the infringing conduct or its discovery starts the period. As Fourth Estate observed, the average processing time then was seven months, leaving ample time. Check the Copyright Office's current pendency figures and its special handling option, because a claim near its deadline cannot wait in the ordinary queue. The registration process itself is covered in Copyright Registration: A Comprehensive Guide.

A dismissed lawsuit does not save you. Foss is brutal here too. After two earlier suits failed for lack of registration allegations, the First Circuit held that equitable tolling could not rescue her from "this lack of diligence in the face of clear instructions." A district court reached a similar result in Emmerich Newspapers, Inc. v. Particle Media, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-00026 (S.D. Miss. July 29, 2025), where the plaintiff had sued before obtaining most of its registrations, saw part of the case dismissed without prejudice, and then argued the first case tolled the second. A dismissal without prejudice leaves you where you would have been had you never filed, unless a savings rule applies, and there is none in the Copyright Act.

Tolling agreements work. Limitations is an affirmative defense under Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(c)(1), which the defendant can waive or contract around. Oracle is a real-world example: Oracle and HPE agreed to toll effective May 6, 2015, and the court calculated the window from that date, barring conduct before May 6, 2012. A standstill costs little and buys time, though it does nothing for claims that had already expired when it was signed. The Copyright Claims Board tolling provision in § 1504(b)(2) is an express statutory pause, and class actions may toll under American Pipe & Construction Co. v. Utah, 414 U.S. 538 (1974) for members of the putative class.

Filing is what counts. A federal action is commenced by filing a complaint under Fed. R. Civ. P. 3, and copyright claims belong exclusively in federal court under 28 U.S.C. § 1338(a). Later amendments are measured by Fed. R. Civ. P. 15(c), and adding a new defendant raises a separate question about what that defendant knew, under Krupski v. Costa Crociere S.p.A., 560 U.S. 538 (2010). For deadlines generally, see Missed Federal Deadlines: Rule 6, Excusable Neglect, and the Deadlines a Court Cannot Excuse.

How far back the money reaches

The statute now gives a plain answer: as far back as the earliest timely claim. The practical answer is more complicated, because each remedy has its own limits.

Two § 412 details turn old claims into small ones. First, "commenced" means the first act in a series. The Ninth Circuit held in Derek Andrew, Inc. v. Poof Apparel Corp., 528 F.3d 696 (9th Cir. 2008) that the first act in a series of ongoing infringements of the same kind marks the commencement of one continuing infringement, and the Fourth Circuit traced post-registration conduct back the same way in Bouchat v. Bon-Ton Department Stores, Inc., 506 F.3d 315 (4th Cir. 2007). So a plaintiff who registers in 2026 after a 2009 first act cannot get statutory damages for 2026 streams. Second, the statutory damages unit is the work, so proving more infringing acts does not multiply the award. That is why theories of daily infringement matter mainly for timeliness, and little for the amount, once statutory damages are in the picture.

Delay can still cost money even without laches. Petrella told the district court on remand that it could take account of delay in assessing profits and injunctive relief, closely examining the defendant's reliance. Nealy did not touch that. The Fifth Circuit held in Energy Intelligence Group, Inc. v. Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, L.P., 948 F.3d 261 (5th Cir. 2020) that failure to mitigate is not a complete defense to statutory damages under the Act, but the parties there agreed it is relevant to the amount, and a plaintiff who sat on known infringement can expect that argument. For a full treatment of remedies, see Copyright Damages and Remedies: Statutory Damages, Profits, Injunctions, and Fees.

The enforcement business and old posts

Enforcement of photo copyrights at scale exists because image-matching crawlers made finding old uses cheap, and statutory damages make small uses expensive. A discovery rule without a damages cap is a good fit for that business. A defendant who got a stock-looking image from a web designer years ago can face a demand for a use it has long since forgotten. That is the concern behind the NBA teams' brief and Justice Gorsuch's skepticism. Judge Clifton's concurrence in Bell went so far as to discourage the plaintiff from continuing, given his many other suits and doubts about whether he even owned the photo.

Courts have not responded with a special rule. Grecco closed the categorical route in the Second Circuit: experience as a litigant does not by itself establish lack of diligence. But it left the specific route open, and it listed the facts that would matter: whether the infringement was easy or difficult to discover, what technology was available, whether the plaintiff used it, how often, and what other efforts it made. A plaintiff who admits to running a crawler has told the court what it should have found, though only discovery can establish what the crawler reached and when. A defendant who has that information is in a strong position at summary judgment. Grecco treats these as facts to be developed, and Hayden shows they can win as a matter of law once developed.

Other defenses often matter more in this setting. See Proving Copyright Infringement: Access, Substantial Similarity, and the Tests Courts Actually Use for proof issues, and Copyright Preemption Under Section 301: When Federal Law Wipes Out Your State Law Claim for what happens when a plaintiff tries to avoid the Copyright Act's clock with state-law labels. A claim equivalent to copyright is preempted under 17 U.S.C. § 301, and Ritchie treated preempted state claims as copyright claims subject to the three-year period.

Procedure: burdens, motions, and standards of review

Burden. Limitations is an affirmative defense. Grecco put it bluntly: "Timeliness . . . is not an element of a copyright infringement claim," and a complaint need not plead facts avoiding the defense. The Third Circuit in Graham has a shifting approach: defendants must show storm warnings, and the burden then moves to the plaintiff to show diligence. Tolling is the plaintiff's burden in the cases discussed here, such as Prather and Emmerich. Check your own circuit on the rest.

Rule 12. Dismissal under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6) is proper when the bar appears on the face of the complaint. Jones v. Bock, 549 U.S. 199 (2007) says so in general, and Staehr v. Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., 547 F.3d 406 (2d Cir. 2008) applied it in the Second Circuit. It happens most often in three situations: a complaint that pleads old dates and an old discovery date; an ownership dispute apparent from the complaint, as in Seven Arts; and a plaintiff whose own earlier pleadings are judicially noticeable, as in Foss. Under Fed. R. Evid. 201 a court can notice that a prior lawsuit and its filings exist, but Grecco cautioned that such notice does not establish the truth of what those filings say, and in Grecco past suits over other infringements proved nothing about this one.

Rule 56. Most limitations rulings of consequence come here. Hayden and Webster affirmed judgment for defendants on developed records. Sohm affirmed the rejection of a defense that offered only the passage of time. Under Fed. R. Civ. P. 56 the defendant needs affirmative facts about what was public, where, and how it reached the plaintiff's world. For the general standard, see Summary Judgment Under Rule 56: Winning and Surviving Before Trial.

Trial. Graham shows the respect owed to a jury's finding on discovery. The first jury found the claims timely; the district court overturned that and granted a new trial, then summary judgment. The Third Circuit reversed and restored the path to the original verdict. So request a special interrogatory under Fed. R. Civ. P. 49 on the date of constructive discovery, because a general verdict tells you nothing on appeal. In Garza, a bench finding on repudiation was reviewed for clear error and affirmed. A denial of equitable tolling is reviewed for abuse of discretion, as in Foss.

Preservation. Two of the most interesting theories in this area went undecided because of how they were raised. Foss lost a daily-display theory by introducing it in a reply brief. Hayden lost a DMCA separate-accrual theory by not developing it below. And any defendant who wants the benefit of a future Supreme Court ruling should plead and preserve the injury rule, in the answer and at each stage, even in a circuit bound by discovery precedent. Warner Chappell's failure to do so below is exactly why it could not get the ruling it wanted.

What this means if you are making a decision now

If you own a copyright and just found a use, write down today's date and how you found it, then register if you have not. Calendar three years from the earliest date a skeptic could say you should have known, not from today. Do not wait for a takedown to resolve things if money is at stake. Statute of Limitations Diary Checklist: A Practical Checklist sets out a sound system for tracking this.

If you received a demand about an old use, preserve what you have, establish the first and last dates of use from server records and not from memory, and ask for the discovery date and registration certificate. Image Copyright Demand Response Checklist: A Practical Checklist walks through the first steps. Keep in mind that deleting a page may not delete the file, and that you must not destroy evidence once a dispute is foreseeable. See Litigation Holds, Spoliation, and Rule 37(e): Preserving Electronic Evidence Before It Costs You the Case.

If you are in a business with a partner, band, or co-founder and ownership is murky, consider whether you want the question answered now. A plain written statement of position starts a clock that helps the party in possession. A vague one starts nothing.

If you are a judge or clerk, the recurring errors are worth listing. Courts have measured the window from the first infringement when the discovery rule applies (Grecco). They have treated sophistication as dispositive (Grecco). They have treated Everly-type events as automatic repudiation (Worrell). And litigants keep importing inquiry-notice language from securities cases, which Hayden refused to adopt as the standard.

Everything here is general information about a moving area of law, and whether a given claim is timely depends on your facts and your forum, so it should not be taken as legal advice on your situation. If you are working through one of these questions, a focused conversation with a copyright litigator before the next date on your calendar is usually time well spent.

Related Documents

Related Articles

• Statutes of Limitations, Accrual, and Tolling: The Clock That Ends Most Claims: the general law of accrual and tolling that § 507(b) builds on and departs from.
• Copyright Damages and Remedies: Statutory Damages, Profits, Injunctions, and Fees: what a timely claim is actually worth, including § 412 and statutory damages.
• Copyright Ownership, Joint Authorship, and Termination of Transfers: the substantive ownership rules behind repudiation disputes.
• Copyright Termination and Reversion: Sections 203 and 304 and Taking Back a Grant: termination rights, which raise their own timing questions and often collide with old ownership fights.
• Image Copyright Demand Letters: How Photo Licensing Enforcement Works and What Claims Are Really Worth: how the photo enforcement business works and how to value old-post demands.
• Understanding Equitable Defenses: A Comprehensive Guide to Laches, Acquiescence, Waiver, and Equitable Estoppel: laches, estoppel, and related defenses after Petrella.
• Proving Copyright Infringement: Access, Substantial Similarity, and the Tests Courts Actually Use: what a plaintiff must prove once the claim is timely.
• Music Licensing in the Streaming Era: Mechanical Royalties, the MLC, and Direct Licensing Deals: how streaming money flows in the sampling scenarios discussed here.
• The Copyright Claims Board: Small Claims Copyright Litigation Under the CASE Act: the small-claims alternative and its parallel limitations rule.
• Litigation Holds, Spoliation, and Rule 37(e): Preserving Electronic Evidence Before It Costs You the Case: preservation duties that begin when a dispute is foreseeable.
• Contributory and Vicarious Copyright Liability After Cox v. Sony: Who Pays When Someone Else Infringes: how downstream and platform liability works.
• Copyright Preemption Under Section 301: When Federal Law Wipes Out Your State Law Claim: why state-law labels rarely escape the Copyright Act's clock.
• Missed Federal Deadlines: Rule 6, Excusable Neglect, and the Deadlines a Court Cannot Excuse: which federal deadlines courts can and cannot excuse.

Related Guides

• Evaluating the Timeliness of a Copyright Claim: A Practical Guide: the step-by-step companion for plaintiffs and defendants evaluating timeliness.
• Responding to an Image Copyright Infringement Demand: A Practical Guide: responding to a demand over an old image use.
• Exercising or Defending a Copyright Termination: A Practical Guide: the procedure when termination and ownership timing overlap.

Related Checklists

• Copyright Claim Timeliness Checklist: A Practical Checklist: a desk checklist for accrual, ownership, tolling, and the damages window.
• Statute of Limitations Diary Checklist: A Practical Checklist: building a limitations calendar that survives staff changes.
• Image Copyright Demand Response Checklist: A Practical Checklist: first steps after a photo demand arrives.

Related Toolkits

• Copyright Timeliness Toolkit: Accrual Chronologies, Tolling Agreements, and Limitations Motions: chronology templates, tolling agreements, repudiation letters, motion outlines, and jury language.
• Image Rights Toolkit: Claim Evaluation Worksheets, Response Letters, and Image Licensing Records: claim evaluation worksheets and response letters for image disputes.