There is a tragedy occurring for artists and creators across the U.S. It is the failure of the U.S. Copyright Office to process copyright applications in a timely and efficient manner. Today’s Washington Post reports that backlogs of copyright applications have stretched from an already bad six months to eighteen months, and the Office continues to receive more applications than it can process.

It’s beginning to rival the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for absurdly long backups, although one key difference is that works are copyrighted automatically upon being put into fixed (including digital) form, and legal protections with copyright begin as soon as you file. There isn’t a traditional approval process like there is with patents; unlike copyright, you might not get a patent, which is why you don’t see “Copyright Pending” messages on creative works.

Still, this is problematic for creators wishing to enforce their rights, as the Copyright Office database can be critical in an infringement case. The only good I can see here is that so many artists and creators are filing copyright applications. When Lucinda and I travel to artist conferences, we strongly encourage artists and creators to register their works so they can have access to the full range of legal remedies if infringed. We provide resources on our web site and hand them out to artists in person.

But we frequently run across creators — writers, photographers, songwriters — who do register their work, but complain about how difficult it is. The Copyright Office recently switched to electronic filing, and our materials describe how to make use of this, but creators tell us how cumbersome and time-consuming it is. (The Post article concludes with a profanity-laden rant against the software by a children’s book publisher.)

It appears that the Copyright Office not only created a cumbersome online registration process, but that process has failed to increase efficiency in processing. Many still file paper applications, but based on what I’ve heard from the creative community, I think I’d be tempted to go that way as well, especially if I were filing a broad portfolio of work.

So what is the Copyright Office’s solution? Jack up the price of non-electronic filing. As any student of economics knows, price points are sensitive, so while the intent is to encourage electronic filing, any increase in cost of registration will deter a set amount of people from applying at all. That will be a tragedy.

I have many friends in the Copyright Office, and Register of Copyrights Mary Beth Peters is a true champion of artists and creators. It is not her fault, nor any of the staff at the Office, that they lack the resources necessary to, essentially, process the empowerment of our creative class. That falls on the folks who set their budget and oversee the Office and its parent, the Library of Congress. I hope the powers that be in Congress in the House and Senate Judiciary and Appropriations Committees will recognize the importance of appropriate funding for the Copyright Office.

Now to the title of this blog post. Those disinclined to recognize the value of copyright as an empowerment for individual artists and creators will not look at this and see how all of these applications represent (1) an explosion of creativity in our society and (2) how these artists and creators see a clear link between their creative process and the rights that copyright affords them.

No, they will point to this as an example of how copyright doesn’t work, how we shouldn’t have any government involvement in copyright, which makes sense for them because they don’t want those rights conveyed to artists and creators by government to begin with.

I can’t change the minds of those people. All I can do is encourage artists and creators to continue to register their works and speak up about the need for improvements in the process.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 8:23 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under US Copyright Office, capitol hill, copyright opponents, education, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.