CASE Act (Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act, 2020)

• Law: Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act), Part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021
• Passed: House 327–85 as part of omnibus; signed December 27, 2020
• Signed by: President Donald Trump
• Creates: The Copyright Claims Board (CCB) within the US Copyright Office

You shared a photo. Or a meme. Or a quote with an image attached. Maybe you don't even remember doing it. Now you've received a notice that a company has filed a copyright claim against you with a tribunal you've never heard of — and if you miss the deadline to respond, you owe $30,000. No judge. No jury. No lawyer required for them to come after you. Welcome to the CASE Act.

How It Passed

The CASE Act was passed in December 2020 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 — a year-end omnibus spending bill running to more than 5,000 pages. Congress passed it with almost no time to read it. The omnibus funding bill is the legislative equivalent of a fire sale: everything goes in, it must pass to fund the government, and most of what's buried in it will never receive independent scrutiny.

The CASE Act had been moving through Congress for years before finally being attached to the omnibus. It could not clear the Senate as a standalone bill because opponents — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Authors Alliance — were warning that it would become a copyright troll's dream. So its sponsors waited for the right omnibus vehicle. A year-end must-pass spending bill under a lame-duck Congress, with everyone distracted by the presidential transition, was that vehicle.

The bill's sponsors argued it filled a gap: copyright holders with small claims had no practical way to enforce their rights in federal court, where filing fees and attorney costs make litigation economically impossible for anything short of major infringement. The Copyright Claims Board was presented as a low-cost alternative that would help independent photographers, artists, and musicians recover small amounts from genuine infringers.

That was the pitch. The EFF, Public Knowledge, and civil liberties organizations warned that the "small claims" framing obscured what the law actually created: an opt-out trap that would be weaponized by large institutional copyright holders against individual internet users. They were right.

What It Does To You

The CASE Act creates the Copyright Claims Board — a three-member tribunal housed within the US Copyright Office, not within the Article III federal court system. The CCB can hear copyright infringement claims and award damages up to $30,000 per proceeding and up to $15,000 per individual work infringed.

Understand the mechanics, because the mechanics are the weapon.

You must opt out, or you're in. When someone files a CCB claim against you, you receive a notice. You have 60 days to file an opt-out. If you opt out, the case goes away from the CCB — the claimant can still sue you in federal court, but they lose the cheap and fast CCB mechanism. If you do NOT opt out within 60 days — for any reason, including never receiving the notice, not understanding what it was, being sick, being deployed, being in the middle of a family crisis — you have waived your right to have the case heard in a real federal court and waived your right to a jury trial. You are locked into the CCB. The damages are still up to $30,000.

No lawyer required to file. A company that owns thousands of photographs, stock images, or registered works can file CCB claims with almost no per-claim cost. Large institutional copyright holders — stock photo agencies, image licensing companies, content farms that purchase and aggregate copyrights specifically to monetize enforcement — can file dozens of claims simultaneously against individual internet users. The barrier to entry for a sophisticated serial claimant is near zero. The burden on the individual recipient is enormous.

Fair use is weakened, not protected. The CCB's limited procedures make it harder to mount a full fair use defense. Federal courts have well-developed jurisprudence on fair use — it is the doctrine that protects commentary, parody, education, news reporting, and ordinary internet culture like meme-making. The CCB's truncated process is structurally less friendly to fair use arguments than federal court, which means the defense that would protect most ordinary internet users is harder to invoke in the forum where ordinary internet users are most likely to face claims.

The notice problem. CCB notices are served by mail and email. Americans move. Email addresses change. Spam filters catch official-looking notices. A student studying abroad, a person between addresses, a retiree who doesn't check email regularly — any of these scenarios means the notice is missed, the 60-day clock runs out, and the person discovers they are bound by a CCB proceeding only when a default judgment shows up.

The copyright troll business model. Before the CASE Act, copyright trolling at scale was economically marginal because filing in federal court had real costs. The CCB dramatically lowers those costs. An entity that files 500 CCB claims per year, obtains default judgments against the roughly predictable percentage of respondents who miss the opt-out window, and collects a fraction of the judgments through debt collection is running a viable and legal revenue operation. The CASE Act was the enabling legislation for this business model.

Rights It Strips

Seventh Amendment — Right to a Jury Trial

The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in federal civil cases at common law where the value in controversy exceeds $20. Copyright claims for $30,000 clearly qualify. The CCB is not an Article III court, and proceeding before it — whether by failure to opt out or by affirmative choice — results in waiver of the jury trial right. For ordinary Americans who miss the opt-out window and don't know their rights have been waived until it's too late, this is not a voluntary waiver. It is a waiver by procedural trap.

Article III — Right to a Federal Court

The right to have civil disputes resolved by an independent Article III judge with lifetime tenure and salary protection — designed to insulate judges from political pressure — is waived when a respondent fails to opt out of CCB proceedings. The CCB's members are not Article III judges. The CCB is not a court with the constitutional authority to issue binding civil judgments. Legal scholars have raised serious questions about whether mandatory jurisdiction in a non-Article III tribunal, triggered by a respondent's failure to act, is constitutional. The constitutional questions are unresolved.

Due Process — Meaningful Notice

For due process to be meaningful, the notice of proceeding must actually reach the respondent in a way that gives them a real opportunity to understand their rights and respond. Service by mail and email to addresses that may be outdated, combined with a 60-day opt-out window and consequences that most ordinary people would not anticipate, falls short of the due process standard in practice even if it technically complies on paper.

First Amendment — Chilling Internet Speech

When ordinary internet users — people who share news photos, make memes, use GIFs in social posts, repost quotes with background images — know that doing so could result in a $30,000 copyright claim that requires them to navigate an opt-out process within 60 days or lose their right to a real court, the rational response is to stop doing those things. Copyright law has always had a chilling effect on speech. The CASE Act amplified that chilling effect by making it cheap and easy to file claims against individuals.

Documented Harms

Copyright Troll Exploitation — Documented Cases

Within the first two years of the CCB's operation (it launched in 2022), it received claims from serial filers — entities that filed multiple claims simultaneously against individuals. Stock image licensing companies, photograph aggregators, and entities whose primary business model appears to be acquiring and enforcing small copyrights in volume were among the early filers. The EFF tracked cases in which CCB claims were filed against individuals for social media posts involving images the respondents had no reasonable way of knowing were registered copyright claims with commercial enforcement intent.

The Default Judgment Problem

The CCB's early statistics confirmed the concern: a significant percentage of respondents failed to respond to proceedings at all — not because they were guilty, not because they conceded the claim, but because they never understood what was happening, or never received the notice, or received it and didn't understand the significance of the 60-day window. Default proceedings allow claimants to obtain judgments in cases that were never contested on the merits.

The EFF's Pre-Passage Warnings Were Accurate

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Authors Alliance documented their opposition to the CASE Act before it passed, specifically warning about the opt-out trap, the default judgment risk, the copyright troll potential, and the weakened fair use protections. Every specific concern they raised was accurate. None of the industry's assurances that the system would be used only by independent creators against genuine infringers proved reliable.

Real Cost on Real People

Copyright defendants who receive CCB notices and consult an attorney to understand their options face legal fees that can substantially exceed the claim amount. A $5,000 claim may cost $3,000 to defend competently. The rational economic choice — settle for a few hundred dollars rather than spend more to fight — is what mass-claim copyright enforcement was always designed to produce. The CASE Act made that calculation dramatically more favorable to serial claimants.

Who Pushed This

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association (MPA), and the software and photography licensing industries were the primary industry advocates. These trade associations represent large institutional copyright holders — the studios, labels, publishers, and agencies that aggregate copyright ownership at scale. Their members are positioned to be plaintiffs, not defendants. Their interests aligned perfectly with making copyright enforcement cheaper and faster.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) was a primary sponsor in the House. Jeffries received substantial campaign contributions from entertainment industry donors — the same industry that lobbied for the CASE Act. He is currently the House Minority Leader.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) was the Senate lead. Tillis chairs or sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee's Intellectual Property Subcommittee and has been one of the most aggressive advocates for expanded copyright enforcement in Congress. His campaign finance records reflect substantial support from the entertainment and software industries.

The US Copyright Office itself supported the legislation, arguing it would provide copyright holders with a practical enforcement mechanism. The Copyright Office houses the CCB — making it an institutional advocate for an expanded role in adjudication. Its institutional interest was expansion, not constraint.

Key Votes

House: 327–85, embedded in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 omnibus.

The 85 House NO votes are the relevant record — members who voted against the omnibus on principle, and members who voted NO specifically because of provisions like the CASE Act. A standalone vote on CASE Act would have revealed far more opposition.

Senate: Passed as part of the omnibus without a recorded standalone vote.

There is no clean Senate vote record on this legislation specifically. The omnibus vehicle was chosen precisely to prevent that record from existing.

Why This Matters for We The Citizens

The CASE Act is a targeted disarmament of ordinary Americans in their relationship with institutional copyright holders. It was sold as a tool for independent creators. It was built for corporate enforcement at scale. The law makes it cheap for large organizations to file hundreds of claims against individuals and expensive for individuals to defend those claims properly. It creates liability traps for the ordinary internet behavior of hundreds of millions of Americans.

A vote for the omnibus containing the CASE Act is not a clean red flag on its own — omnibus bills require judgment about the full package. But the members who specifically championed this legislation, the industry donors who funded those members, and the organizations that opposed it and were ignored are all documented. The outcome — a copyright tribunal that cannot realistically be used by the independent photographer it was supposedly designed to help, but can easily be weaponized by the stock image licensing company — was predicted. It came true. No one was surprised except the ordinary internet users who suddenly found themselves in copyright proceedings they didn't know were coming.

See also: Bad Laws Overview | FOSTA-SESTA | TikTok Ban Act