Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition

The Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition (the “Compendium” or “Third Edition”) is the administrative manual of the Register of Copyrights concerning Title 17 of the United States Code and Chapter 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It provides instruction to agency staff regarding their statutory duties and provides expert guidance to copyright applicants, practitioners, scholars, the courts, and members of the general public regarding institutional practices and related principles of law. The Compendium documents and explains the many technical requirements, regulations, and legal interpretations of the U.S. Copyright Office with a primary focus on the registration of copyright claims, documentation of copyright ownership, and recordation of copyright documents, including assignments and licenses. It describes the wide range of services that the Office provides for searching, accessing, and retrieving information located in its extensive collection of copyright records and the associated fees for these services. The Compendium provides guidance regarding the contents and scope of particular registrations and records. And it seeks to educate applicants about a number of common mistakes, such as providing incorrect, ambiguous, or insufficient information, or making overbroad claims of authorship. The Compendium does not cover every principle of copyright law or detail every aspect of the Office’s administrative practices. The Office may, in exceptional circumstances, depart from its normal practices to ensure an outcome that is most appropriate. The Compendium does not override any existing statute or regulation. The policies and practices set forth in the Compendium do not in themselves have the force and effect of law and are not binding upon the Register of Copyrights or Copyright Office staff. However, the Compendium does explain the legal rationale and determinations of the Copyright Office, where applicable, including circumstances where there is no controlling judicial authority

How to Obtain Permission

How to obtain permission to use or adapt a copyrighted work in the United States. One way to make sure your intended use of a copyrighted work is lawful is to obtain permission or a license from the copyright owner. First step: Research copyright status Next step: Contact copyright owne

Small Claims Procedures for Library and Archives Opt-Outs and Class Actions

The U.S. Copyright Office is proposing procedures for a library or archive to preemptively opt out of Copyright Claims Board (CCB) proceedings, as directed by the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act of 2020. Additionally, the Office is proposing procedures to address a party’s decision to participate in or opt out of a class action arising out of the same transaction or occurrence as a claim before the CCB. The CASE Act directs the Register to establish regulations allowing a library or archives that does not wish to participate in proceedings before the CCB to preemptively opt out of all such proceedings. The proposed rule includes procedures by which a library or archives may notify the Office of its intention to opt out. The proposed rule also provides that the Office will maintain a list of libraries and archives that have opted out on its website. With respect to class action proceedings, the proposed rule provides that any party to an active CCB proceeding who receives notice of a class action arising out of the same transaction or occurrence as the CCB proceeding must either opt out of the class action or seek written dismissal of the CCB within fourteen days of receiving the class action notice. Comments in response to the proposed rule are due by 11:59 p.m. eastern time on October 4, 2021

FINDING THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: Copyright Review Management System Toolkit

Working over a span of nearly eight years, the University of Michigan Library received three grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to generously fund CRMS, a cooperative effort by partner research libraries to identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust. In CRMS- US (2008– 11), CRMS reviewed over 170,000 volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library that were published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 (“CRMS- US”). That first project team— which included reviewers from the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota, and Indiana University— identified nearly 87,000 volumes as being in the public domain, in addition to collecting renewal information and identifying rights holders of works in copyright. In CRMS- World (2011– 14), we built on that accomplishment by reviewing an additional 110,000 US volumes and expanded the scope of the review to include 170,000 English- language volumes published in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia between 1872 and 1944 (“CRMS- World”). This second grant continued through the end of 2014 and included initial development on an interface for works from Spain, a process for quality control, and an expanded suite of materials to allow an expert member of our project team to train and monitor reviewers online. The current CRMS grant (2014– 16) simultaneously made possible continued copyright review of CRMS- World volumes, the development of this toolkit, and planning related to the long- term sustainability of CRMS. We are hopeful that, whatever the near term brings for CRMS as an individual project, the valuable work of identifying public domain works will continue. We are grateful for the support and collaboration of all who have touched this project

Going means trouble and staying makes it double: the value of licensing recorded music online

This paper discusses whether a copyright compensation system (CCS) for recorded music—endowing private Internet subscribers with the right to download and use works in return for a fee—would be welfare increasing. It reports on the results of a discrete choice experiment conducted with a representative sample of the Dutch population consisting of 4986 participants. Under some conservative assumptions, we find that applied only to recorded music, a mandatory CCS could increase the welfare of rights holders and users in the Netherlands by over €600 million per year (over €35 per capita). This far exceeds current rights holder revenues from the market of recorded music of ca. €144 million per year. A monthly CCS fee of ca. €1.74 as a surcharge on Dutch Internet subscriptions would raise the same amount of revenues to rights holders as the current market for recorded music. With a voluntary CCS, the estimated welfare gains to users and rights holders are even greater for CCS fees below €20 on the user side. A voluntary CCS would also perform better in the long run, as it could retain a greater extent of market coordination. The results of our choice experiment indicate that a well-designed CCS for recorded music would simultaneously make users and rights holders better off. This result holds even if we correct for frequently observed rates of overestimation in contingent valuation studies

Self-archiving and the Copyright Transfer Agreements of ISI-ranked library and information science journals

A study of Thomson-Scientific ISI ranked Library and Information Science (LIS) journals (n = 52) is reported. The study examined the stances of publishers as expressed in the Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs) of the journals toward self-archiving, the practice of depositing digital copies of one\u27s works in an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant open access repository. Sixty-two percent (32) do not make their CTAs available on the open Web; 38% (20) do. Of the 38% that do make CTAs available, two are open access journals. Of the 62% that do not have a publicly available CTA, 40% are silent about self-archiving. Even among the 20 journal CTAs publicly available there is a high level of ambiguity. Closer examination augmented by publisher policy documents on copyright, self-archiving, and instructions to authors reveals that only five, 10% of the ISI-ranked LIS journals in the study, actually prohibit self-archiving by publisher rule. Copyright is a moving target, but publishers appear to be acknowledging that copyright and open access can co-exist in scholarly journal publishing. The ambivalence of LIS journal publishers provides unique opportunities to members of the community. Authors can self-archive in open access archives. A society-led, global scholarly communication consortium can engage in the strategic building of the LIS information commons. Aggregating OAI-compliant archives and developing disciplinary-specific library services for an LIS commons has the potential to increase the field\u27s research impact and visibility. It may also ameliorate its own scholarly communication and publishing systems and serve as a model for others

Copyright Small Claims

It appears beyond dispute that under the current federal system small copyright claimants face formidable challenges in seeking to enforce the exclusive rights to which they are entitled. The Copyright Office therefore recommends that Congress consider the creation of an alternative forum that will enable copyright owners to pursue small infringement matters and related claims arising under the Copyright Act. In light of the state court tradition of referring to claims of modest economic value as “small claims,” many have adopted that term to reference the nature of the claims that are the focus of this Report, as does the Report itself. Such claims, however, are not small to the individual creators who are deprived of income or opportunity due to the misuse of their works, and the problem of addressing lower-value infringements is not a small one for our copyright system. But how would we structure an alternative process? Concerns of pragmatism and efficiency are core considerations, but they are not the only ones, and they must be viewed in the larger context of federal powers. Our Constitution protects both the role of the federal judiciary and the rights of those who participate in adjudicatory proceedings. These principles are enshrined in Article III and the Fifth and Seventh Amendments, and in judicial interpretations of these and other constitutional provisions. Any alternative process must fit comfortably within the constitutional parameters. In light of the existing constitutional landscape, the challenges of the current system, and the views and insights of those who participated in this study, it appears that the most promising option to address small copyright claims would be a streamlined adjudication process in which parties would participate by consent. Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of the commenting parties viewed the Copyright Office as the logical and appropriate home for such a small claims system. In recent years, many have emphasized the potential of voluntary solutions to certain problems of copyright enforcement.11 In this case, a voluntary approach necessarily will fall short of a full-fledged judicial process, offering the complete panoply of copyright remedies, to which small copyright claimants could turn reliably and affordably to pursue infringers. Such a process is what our legal system would provide in an ideal world. But in the real world of constitutional and institutional limitations, a voluntary system with strong incentives for participation on both sides seems more attainable, at least in the near term. Importantly, such a voluntary approach would retain a mandatory backstop; parties who declined to consent to the alternative small claims proceeding could still be summoned to federal district court by a claimant who was able to take that path