The Online Books Page

INFORMATION ABOUT

THE CATALOG OF COPYRIGHT ENTRIES

News: All active renewals, and most active original registrations, are now online, thanks to volumes scanned by the Copyright Office and hosted by the Internet Archive. We are working on indexing the new volumes now.

The Catalog of Copyright Entries, published by the US Copyright Office, contains a list of all copyright registrations received. This information can be used to This page includes pointers to electronic copies of copyright registrations. We're particularly interested in renewal registrations to help find public domain works, but we also collect original registrations. We'd like to get help from the community in putting this material online, and in doing useful analyses of it.

Summaries and indexes

At present, there is no single searchable index for all online copyright registrations. Below we list sites that allow a large selection of records to be searched. We list them roughly in chronological order of coverage.

Copyright records, by year

1906 - 1922

Our historic registration records page has pointers to original and renewal copyright records from before 1923. All copyrights from these years have expired in the US. After we do some more work inventorying later copyrights, we hope to include earlier years in this section as well. We have also not yet found all volumes from the years featured.

1923 - 1949

See this page for original and renewal copyright records from 1923 to 1949. Original copyrights from these years may still be in force; renewal copyrights from these years (for original copyrights from before 1923) have now expired in the US. We are still missing some volumes from these years, but hope they will eventually be filled in; please let us know if you find any we don't have.

1950 - 1977 (with renewals of copyrights from 1922 - 1950)

These years are not yet in an official database; however, volunteers have scanned renewal page images for many book-related categories, and we're starting to see original registrations as well for some categories in these years. See also the transcriptions and indexes above. Books may be covered under copyrights in related categories. (For instance, if a portion of a book first appeared in a magazine, it may still be copyrighted under the magazine's copyright even if the book's copyright was not renewed.) A few renewals for previous years were not cataloged until the 1978 issue; relevant page images for books and periodicals are linked to below.

The page images for original and renewal registrations can be found here:

Some volumes are listed with page links that include a summary of the alphabetical range covered by the page, making it easier for people to find relevant pages in their search. (Thanks to Philip Harper for producing summaries for 1955-1957, and 1959-1963, and to Meredith Dixon for producing summaries for 1964 and 1965!) Others are linked as whole volumes or volume segments. To find entries in volumes listed without page links, use the indexes included in the scans, or the searchable text transcriptions of renewals when available. (You can also download all of the Gutenberg renewal transcriptions, covering mostly books.)

1978 - present (with renewals of copyrights from 1950 - 1977)

You can see copyright registration records from 1978 onward from the Copyright Office's Copyright Records web site. This will include renewals for copyrights from 1951 onward (and some, but not all, renewals for 1950 copyrights), as well as original registrations from 1978 onward. For information on how to use the system, see this file. Note that due to changes in copyright law, all works copyrighted in 1964 or later automatically had their copyrights renewed, whether or not a renewal was filed, and works copyrighted after 1977 have a single long term with no renewal.

If you'd like to work with the database as a whole, and are willing to run some code to process it, here is an unoffical copy of the Copyright Office data from Public.resource.org. Google has also made available an XML version of these records, slightly massaged.

Credits

This work is supported by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, which hosts this site, supports its editor, and has scanned many of the drama and image renewals, by the Universal Library Project at Carnegie Mellon, which scanned page images for the "books" portion of the renewal volumes, the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, which provide much of the storage space for the scanned images, by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Newark Public Library, and Stanford University Libraries, which have supplied volumes to be scanned, by Google Books, which has scanned many of the Catalog of Copyright Entries volumes, by Philip Harper and Project Gutenberg, who are providing transcriptions of some of these records, and by volunteers and donors from the Internet community. Volunteer scanners of renewal pages include Dianne Bean, Mary Mark Ockerbloom, John Mark Ockerbloom, Juliet Sutherland, and Greg Weeks. If you'd like to help out, write onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu to find out more how you can get involved with this project. Thanks to everyone helping out. (Thanks also to the Copyright Office for compiling this material in the first place, and for maintaining the online records from 1978 onward.)

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Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom (onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu)
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