You have worked out which of the two filings you are making, submitted online, paid, and got a diary number. It feels finished. It is not. Submitting starts a 30-day clock to post a physical packet, and the application waits until that packet arrives.

Read the acknowledgement slip, not a checklist

The portal issues an acknowledgement slip when you submit. Its numbered instructions are the requirements for your filing, and they are more specific than any summary. Read yours rather than a checklist, including this one: the list is generated for your application.

The clock runs from submission, not payment, not printing.

Four details that catch people out:

The slip prints twice, and the two copies contradict each other. You get a page headed Applicant’s Copy and a page headed Office Copy. They look identical, but read the instruction line on each: the one headed Applicant’s Copy tells you to post the Office Copy, and the one headed Office Copy tells you to post the Applicant’s Copy. They cannot both be right.

Our reading, and what our filings have used, is to send the sheet headed Office Copy and keep the other, on the basis that the office keeps the office copy. If it bothers you, print and enclose both pages. It costs one sheet of paper and the ambiguity disappears.

The payment receipt is a different document and looks similar enough to grab by mistake. It is not the slip.

“2 copies of the work” is item one, and for a sound recording it means the audio, on disc or drive, two of them. For a musical work it is the notation. It is the requirement independent filers most often skip, partly because the phrase sounds like it means paperwork.

“Authorization from author/publisher” is not the same as authorising your signatory. The slip’s item asking for authorisation from the author or publisher means the consents and assignments from the people who made the work. If your applicant is a firm or a company, there is a second, separate document: something showing that the human being who signed the form was authorised by the entity to sign it, whether that is a board resolution or an authorisation letter. Nothing on the slip tells you this. We learned it from a query that asked for exactly that and nothing else, on an application that was otherwise complete.

Also enclose a signed print-out of the application, which the slip calls out as its own numbered instruction.

Several listed items usually will not apply: a demand draft (you paid online), a power of attorney (only if you file through an attorney), and a trade mark search certificate (artistic works only).

⚠️ Take the postal address off your own slip, not off the downloadable form. The official Form XIV published as a PDF still gives an old address for the Copyright Office. The portal’s generated documents give the current one, and even those are not internally consistent: on our own filings the application form and the acknowledgement slip printed the same street address with two different PIN codes. Use the address on the acknowledgement slip that came with your filing, and if you want certainty before posting, ring the office and confirm.

The requirement nobody mentions: you must serve the other parties

This one is on the form itself, as a declaration you sign, clause 2 of Form XIV commits you to having sent copies of the application and its statements by pre-paid registered post to the other parties concerned, under rule 70 of the Copyright Rules.

The form then points at the columns that define “other parties” (the author, the owners, and anyone else holding rights in the work) and gives you a table to fill in with each name, address and date of dispatch.

⚠️ The rule number on your own paperwork is probably wrong. The official Form XIV is headed [See rule 70] and cites rule 70 in the service clause itself. Granted registration certificates are headed with rule 70 as well.

The form the online portal generates for you says something different. Its header carries rule 70, but the service clause a few lines below it cites “rule 16 of the Copyright Rules, 1958”, the superseded numbering from the old rules. One generated document, two different citations, and the one people quote is the wrong one, because it is the one sitting in the paragraph they are reading.

The obligation is identical either way. Only the citation is stale. If you go looking it up, look up rule 70, and do not be thrown when your own filed application says otherwise.

So if you name an author who is not the applicant, you are declaring on the form that you posted them a copy of the application. Not emailed. Posted, registered.

The fix: do the service at the same time as the packet, keep the receipts, and fill the table honestly. It costs one more trip to the post office and removes a defect that is sitting, signed, on the face of your own application.

Practicalities

Registered or Speed Post, and keep the proof of delivery, if a question ever arises about whether the packet arrived, that receipt is all you will have. Write the diary number on the outside as well as inside.

Diarise the deadline the day you submit. Thirty days is generous right up until you are waiting on a notary.

Next: reading the portal.