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Researching the Copyright Status of a Work
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Archival copyright registation and renewal records are maintained in the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress on index cards filed in drawers such as these. Modern records are maintained electronically. Older records are also maintained in log books and full-sheet registration forms and renewal forms. |
| Renewal Investigations The most authoritative source of information about whether particular copyright registrations have been renewed is information stored and maintained by the Library of Congress. Below is the top part of a log page recording three registrations taken out in 1940. (The second item, registration 220621, a song titled “Lola” by C. Arthur Fifer, is used as an example on plagiarism and similarity on a Citations and Case Summaries page on similarity elsewhere in this web site.) The manner in which registrations numbers are found on these pages is by looking at the stamped numbers in the top left area of the page. “220” is the number of thousands (thus, all registrations on a page so stamped must fall within 220,000 to 220,999) and “6” is the number of hundreds within the particular group of thousands (thus, in this combination, all registrations on this page must fall within 220,600 to 220,699). These pages are bound within books which can be inspected at the Library of Congress. |
| The above page shows listings for which the copyrights were not renewed. The page below (only part of which has been reproduced) shows two registrations which were renewed as well as additional ones which were not. At the lower right corner of the boxes for registrations 90,922 and 90,924, you can see where Copyright Office personnel have written in an “R” followed by a six-digit number. This is the renewal number. (These are almost certainly written by a different hand because these numbers could not be determined until renewal took place and the works did not become eligible for copyright renewal until 27 years after the original registrations.) |
| below: an enlargement of the renewal information area for registration 90,922. More visible in the enlargment than in the fuller illustrations is the word “Renewal” pre-printed on the form. Keeping in mind where “Renewal” appears in the box for each listing on the form, you can see that there is an empty space under “Renewal” for registration 90,929, which is “Lola Fox Trot,” a derivative version of the same “Lola” by C. Arthur Fifer which was registered as an unpublished musical composition ten months earlier (see registration 220,621 on the first illustration of this page). |
| (A lawsuit concerning this song titled “Lola” is summarized in the Citations and Case Summaries page for similarity.) Those who find it too difficult to visit the Library of Congress to examine these resources can find more-than-adequate records at many major libraries. Prepared by the Copyright Office and published by the Government Printing Office since 1891, the many volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries list the registrations and renewals recorded by the Copyright Office for the time period covered by the particular Catalog. (For some types of works, Catalogs are published several times a year; for the others, one volume is issued annually.) (Read note about variations of title for the Catalog.) The illustrations pages on this web site for copyright renewal, foreign and derivative works contain images from the Catalogs of the entries for several works. Among them: The Last Time I Saw Paris (the movie and the song), Dodsworth (book), Road to Bali (movie), Heavenly Daze (movie), The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (book), and I Cover the Waterfront (book). When conducting an investigation of copyright registration and renewal using the Catalogs, two separate steps are undertaken: (1) a listing for the work is sought in a Catalog published near the time that the work was registered; (2) a listing for the work is sought in the “Renewals” section at the back of a Catalog published near the time that the work was eligible for renewal. The second of these searches is usually conducted in one or more Catalog volumes dated 27 and 28 years after the Catalog that contained the listing for the original registration. If you are interested in the copyright status of a motion picture, you’re in luck. Rather than having to search in multiple volumes of the Catalog, you can turn to “cumulative” listings that have already been collated to match renewal listings to the listing for the original registrations. Two private-industry firms have prepared reference books that eliminate much of the “leg work” that you would otherwise have to do. The following two illustrations demonstrate how these reference books can help. The first illustration is section of a multi-episode listing as it appeared in Cumulative Copyright Catalog, Motion Pictures, 1950-59, published by the U.S. Copyright Office. (Even this first illustration demonstrates a situation where much of the duplicative effort has been eliminated. For motion picture registrations, the Copyright Office published Cumulative Copyright Catalogs that cover ten-year and multi-decade periods. Owing to these volumes covering such long time periods, a person looking up, for example, a 1935 work without knowing whether the registration was made in late 1934, any time in 1935, or early in 1936, does not have to conduct fruitless searches in two wrong-choice volumes before coming up with the listing in the third volume examined. The cumulative volumes group registrations to cover 1907-1939 (although here 1907-1912 is a separate section from 1912-1939), 1940-1949, 1950-1959, and 1960-1969.) |
| The second illustration — as should be obvious — is the same image as
the first except for the addition of supplementary information which appears in
red. The red material designates the information that was gleaned from the renewal
listings. Although the second illustration is not a strict reproduction of the
format of the two firm’s reference books, the illustration does give a good idea of
what users can expect to encounter. (A cosmetic difference between this illustration
and the books is that the books print the renewal addenda in black, although the lettering
format does distinctly offset the addenda from the listings previously in place in the Cumulative
Copyright Catalog.) On the above image: dates in red are renewal dates; serial numbers in red are renewal numbers. “N.R.” indicates that no renewal was found in the renewal registrations. Those seeking the reference books should know that they are: (1) The Film Superlist series. The separate volumes are titled Film Superlist: Motion Pictures in the U.S. Public Domain and divided into the same ten-year and multi-decade groupings as the Cumulative Copyright Catalogs prepared by the U.S. Copyright Office. The series was originated by Walter E. Hurst (publishing through 7 Arts Press) and continued after Hurst’s death by D. Richard Baer (publishing through Hollywood Film Archive); (2) Motion Picture Copyrights and Renewals 1950-59, by David Pierce, published by Milestone & Co., 1989. This second company issued just the one volume. The image with the red addenda (immediately above) is a mock-up made by the copyrightdata.com editor, and although it resembles the listings in the above-named books, this image was not copied from either of those publications. The red text was added electronically to an image scanned directly from a copy of Cumulative Copyright Catalog, Motion Pictures, 1950-59 (published by the U.S. Copyright Office). Most listings in the Catalog of Copyright Entries and the Cumulative Copyright Catalog are individual listings of one title with one registration. For the above two-image illustration, I chose a listing with multiple registrations. (It’s one television series with hundreds of weekly episodes. The illustrations cut short the list of episodes early in the alphabetic list.) In this way, I provided the largest number of collated listings possible in the smallest amount of space. Those consulting the actual Film Superlist and Motion Picture Copyrights and Renewals books will find that each separate work takes up the better part of a column inch of space on the page, in that almost every listing has its own claimant, length and format information in addition to title, date and registration number. |
| Woud you like to have made available a computer-based means of
obtaining registration and renewal records? It would have
Copyrightdata.com is planning such a project. Keep checking back to this space to learn of the process, OR, if you are a potential heavy-user able to guarantee you would pay to obtain the records, contact Copyrightdata.com. Computers can do things that paper records do not:
The time for an electronic searchable database of copyright
registrations and renewals has come. |
Having the Copyright Office investigate for you
The nearest thing to an effortless search for copyright status on a work is to have the Copyright Office do it for you. This is an expensive option, and the backlog of work faced by the necessarily-limited staff at the Copyright Office can result in a long wait for your results. The benefit to a Copyright Office search is that their personnel has access to the most records — far more than those at college and major-city public libraries — and that these are the original, complete records, so a search has more facts to draw upon. The staff works with the records throughout their work days, so they are well-versed in the intricacies of the records.
The illustration immediately below is the text from a Copyright Office search report. A vast amount of blank space below the text has been omitted from this image. The particular movie reported on in this search is one of the fourteen Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and co-starring Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon is among the four Holmes films starring Rathbone and Bruce that is widely available on low-cost video because it entered the public domain. The Copyright Office denoted the fact of the copyright registration citing the underlying work upon which the screenplay was based. The particular short story named was first published in 1903, and consequently has entered the public domain in both the United States and the story author’s native England.
The illustration below is the bottom of the search report form reproduced above. This wording concerning “[r]egulations... prohibit... giving legal opinions or advice” appears at the bottom of a substantial number of pieces of Copyright Office correspondence, including all of the (two-hundred-plus) search reports that this writer has seen.
The texts of hundreds of search reports such as this (including for many movies that are not commonly-available from public-domain distributors) are reproduced in the latest editions of the Film Superlist books. (See above for publication information on this series.)
You’ve seen the illustrations —
You’ve read the captions —
Now read passages from the law
and read what the courts decided.
Read Citations and Case Summaries on:
• Copyright Office opinion is not decisive, final or conclusive
• Copyright Office publications are not definitive
• Copyright Office records are not conclusive
• Research into copyright status
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The Copyright Registration and Renewal Information Chart and Web Site
© 2007,2008 David P. Hayes