On Jul 10, 2009, at 6:38 PM, <trumpe...@verizon.net> wrote:
Has anyone sent their compositions to the Library of Congress to
be
copyrighted? I sent one almost a year ago. Aren't they supposed to
send you
some kind of certificate of copyright? I paid for it, filled out
all the
forms and if you go to search your own copyright they want to
charge you a
fee to search for it. What kind of nonsense is that?
As a music publisher, I send in stuff to the Copyright Office all the
time, including my own works. In the past it has normally taken about
a month to get the certificate back, but this year there is an
extremely heavy backlog, so severe that the office is estimating that
those at the end of the line may have to wait up to *two years* for
processing.
Part of the problem is the recession: the number of personnel handling
copyright submissions has decreased while the number of submissions has
continued to increase--as it has been doing for decades now.
To try to get ahead of this, LOC has set up an online system whereby
one can (at least theoretically) file a copyright claim online. They
give a $10 discount to anyone who registers that way. Unfortunately,
whoever set up this system is so paranoid about security that the
registration process on line is incredibly cumbersome and annoying--to
the point that I wouldn't use it even if it were free. To create a
password, for instance, you have to follow a whole page of instructions
guaranteed to make the password absolutely unrememberable--then they
add a clause telling you that you have to *change* the password (using
the same rules) *whenever they tell you to,* regardless of reason or
frequency. I might add that if the password creation algorithm is
followed literally, one cannot use the letters A, I, or O, or any
two-letter combination that spells a word.
--And they still require you to mail in two deposit copies, so a
package needs to be sent to them anyway.
Small wonder then that everybody is ignoring the online registration
system and keeping to the old method, despite the increasingly long
wait for results.
The Copyright Office, though it still accepts the paper registration
forms, no longer makes them available for printout. You have to xerox
your own blank copies to fill in. I suspect their next step will be to
refuse the paper submissions altogether--at which point, unless the
online system is drastically simplified, I intend to simply mark my
publications as copyrighted, and not formally register them at all.
That provides adequate protection for most purposes.
Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://www.kallistimusic.com/
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