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Copyright update

Meetings at the Copyright Office, Winter 2007

At the end of February, ASMP Executive Director Gene Mopsik and General Counsel Victor Perlman attended this year’s installment of a briefing session at the Copyright Office in Washington that ASMP attends annually. The meeting consists of reports by senior Copyright Office staff members on major developments over the past year that affect the Copyright Office and others involved in the copyright world. Normally, the meeting is chaired by the Register of Copyright, Marybeth Peters. This year, however, illness prevented her attendance and participation, and the meeting was chaired by David O. Carson, formerly General Counsel to the Copyright Office and currently the Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs.

Among the most immediately noticeable of the recent developments within the Copyright Office were several changes in senior personnel and positions. Jule Sigall, the former Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs and the author of the Copyright Office’s report and proposed legislation on Orphan Works, left the public sector and is now working at Microsoft. David Carson, who had been General Counsel, took over Sigall’s former position. Tanya Sandros is the new General Counsel. Maria Pallante is the new Deputy General Counsel. Nanette Petruzelli, formerly head of the Examining Division, is now Special Legal Advisor for Reengineering. She has been replaced by James Vassar as head of the Examining Division.

Another major change that was apparent before the presentations began was in the physical plant. Over much of the past year, most of the Copyright Office staff has been in temporary quarters in Crystal City/Alexandria, VA, while the office space in the Madison Building on Capitol Hill has been renovated and reconfigured. Even though that work has not yet been completed, we were able to use one of the new conference rooms, after which the people from the Copyright Office had to travel back to Crystal City following the meeting.

A large part of the conference consisted of a demonstration of the new electronic registration system that should go on-line this coming summer. When it is up and running, you will be able to file your registrations electronically, filling out and submitting the applications on-line, and paying through a deposit account or credit card. For UNpublished works and for works published only on-line, you will be able to submit the deposit copies electronically, as well. However, because registrations of published works require deposit copies of the “best edition” of the works, on-line registrations of published works will need to be accompanied by traditional deliveries of hard copies of the deposit material. The Copyright Office is working on a bar code system to help match up the electronic applications with the hard deposit copies of published works. You can look for occasional notices regarding the progress of the new registration system, and other developments, at the Copyright Office’s website, http://www.copyright.gov.

We were told to expect to see a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking regarding some of the details of electronic registration, including things like the preferred formats for deposit copies. As usual, ASMP will participate in this process on behalf of the members.

Another change that is expected this summer will be in registration fees. The good news is that it is likely that the fees will actually go down for digital registrations, reduced from the current $45 (which will remain in effect for conventional registrations) to $35 per registration. The bad news is that it appears likely that fees for registering collections and groups of works will increase, based on the numbers of works included in the registration.

Additional good news was that, once electronic registration is in place, the Copyright Office hopes to make the turn-around time for registrations two to three weeks in place of the current two to four months.

Maria Pallante talked about anticipated orphan works legislation, which is expected to be introduced by Sen. Leahy within the next month or so. We expect that it will be based largely on the last version of the bill that died in the House last year which contained many of the changes that ASMP had urged (thanks in large part to letters and other communications by ASMP members). In addition, we hope it will reflect some additional improvements that we have been discussing with Congressional staff over the past few months.