On May 4, News/Media Alliance filed comments with the U.S. Copyright Office objecting to the Office’s proposed fee hike for the Group Registration of Updates to a News Website (GRNW) option that allows publishers to easily register online content. The Office’s fee study proposes a 3.5-fold price increase for the application, from $95 to $350.
NMA’s submission was joined by forty-nine press associations and included letters from 30 state press associations and individual publishers. The comments as well as the letters highlighted especially small and local publishers’ difficulty of absorbing additional costs while keeping their communities informed and investing in high-quality journalism. Given the economic evidence of price sensitivity, a large registration fee increase is likely to significantly depress news registration practices. To avoid outcomes that are unfair or inequitable in light of the “objectives of the copyright system,” the comments call for freezing the proposed GRNW fee increase, striking the inefficient content-based limitation in GRNW, and reducing the amount of indirect costs credited to registration-fees.
