WASHINGTON – The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) hosted an open workshop yesterday titled “Copyright Registration: Best Practices.” Three members of the U.S. Copyright Office were present and conducted the workshop to nearly 200 participants via a live and webcast audience. Ted A. Hirakawa, Acting Chief of the Literary Division; William Briganti, Assistant Chief of the Visual Arts Division; and Susan Todd, Program Manager, discussed a variety of issues and difficulties which artists face when registering for copyright.

The presenters discussed specific issues which have plagued both artists and the Copyright Office and attempted to clarify some of the more complex questions about Copyright. Mr. Hirakawa clarified what particular rights belong to the creator and what precisely constitutes infringement.

Though seemingly obvious, it was made clear that the best step an artist can make toward protecting himself (or herself) and his work is to register with the U.S. Copyright Office. The CO has gone through several substantive changes over the past few years after 2007, when it began to offer online registration. Not only does this change streamline an otherwise time-consuming and labor-intensive process, it provides artists a more timely response and provides the public with a record of the artist’s registrations. Though hard-copy deposits and paper applications are still accepted (for a higher fee), the CO is encouraging artists to register online.

As the online system is still relatively new, both Ms. Todd and Mr. Briganti walked the audience through various aspects of registering online under different artistic types and needs. A link to the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO – pronounced echo) can be found here.

Some of the benefits of eCO include a web-based system, stored account information of the artist, easy to use templates, online status tracking, e-mail confirmation, , and it can be used to open a CO deposit account. eCO also includes a list of acceptable file types that can be used for electronic deposit submission.

Both the presenters and the SIIA seemed encouraged by the level of interest portrayed by the audience members. Toward the end of the workshop, the presenters fielded a number of questions from both live and web audience members, many of which were based in the visual arts.

– Posted by Kathleen Saylor, Copyright Alliance Intern

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 10:43 am by admin and is filed under US Copyright Office, copyright law, creators, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.