Comment from Norman, William

The Copyright Office must consider a tiered fee structure that preserves a low cost category for individual authors to avoid creating a massive financial barrier for independent creators. Moving from a forty-five dollar individual filing to a mandatory eighty-five dollar standard fee represents an eighty-eight percent price jump that far outpaces inflation. This financial hurdle has real world consequences for justice. Because I could not afford the current forty-five dollar per book filing fee for my works, I was unable to participate in the recent Anthropic settlement regarding AI training data. Doubling the entry price for registration will only further exclude vulnerable creators from the legal protections they deserve and will lead to a significant decline in the accuracy of the public record. The justification that these funds are needed for a ninety-seven million dollar digital modernization project is particularly hard to accept in the current technological landscape. Modern artificial intelligence tools and automated coding platforms have proven that sophisticated software systems can be built with far greater efficiency than traditional government procurement allows. It is frustrating to see a federal agency demand more money from artists to build a new system when modern technology could likely deliver the same results for a fraction of the cost. Instead of placing the burden of high development costs on the backs of authors, the office should leverage these advanced tools to lower their overhead and implement a micro-entity fee tier that makes copyright protection accessible to everyone.