COPYCENSE

The U.S. Copyright Office is now offering a service that allows copyright owners of digital works the ability to register the work for protection prior to a work either being released or published. The Office says the new service is intended for “movies, recorded music, and other copyrighted materials before copyright owners have had the opportunity to market fully their products.”

This preregistration gambit affords significant advantages to Big Content, which pushed for this provision: it allows a copyright owner to file an infringement action before the an original work is either registered or publicly released. Once the copyright owner completes a full registration, it will be eligible to receive statutory damages and attorneys’ fees in an infringement action.

The preregistration procedure is part of the Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005, which itself was part of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act.

U.S. Copyright Office. Preregister Your Work. Nov. 15, 2005.

See also:

Federal Register. Preregistration of Certain Unpublished Copyright Claims (Proposed Rulemaking: 37 CFR Part 202). Aug. 4, 2005.

Declan McCullagh. New Law Cracks Down on P2P Pirates. News.com. April 27, 2005.

Eric Goldman. Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act–New Criminal Copyright Infringement Standards. April 21, 2005.

Declan McCullagh. Prison Terms on Tap for ‘Prerelease’ Pirates. News.com. April 19, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

I missed this somehow, but in mid-October, the U.S. Copyright Office announced that upgrades it is implementing to its LOCIS system will go live in December.

The Office explains:

The new system offers new features including keyword searching and the use of a single database containing records for monographs, serials, and recorded documents.

All of the approximately 20 million records for registrations and recorded documents in the current system will be migrated to the new search method, a similar system used by other parts of the Library of Congress for searching collections.

Unfortunately, the new system will do nothing to improve with which records actually enter the database so they can be searched. The Office warns that even after the new system is in place, it will still take “several months” for records to become searchable in the database. This means that the only alternative for doing a decent copyright record search is through fee-based databases like Lexis.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.