Book People Archive

Copyright office database freed, and a renewal gap filled in

I'm happy to report two developments that should help people trying to
research the copyright status of books and other creations.

The first is that copyright registration information from the Copyright
Office's database (which covers registrations from 1978 onward) has been
harvested and is now available for bulk download via

   http://bulk.resource.org/copyright/

Peter Brantley has more information at

    http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/09/making_a_brouha.html

The data that's there is in machine-readable form, and isn't really
suitable for direct human use and consumption at this point.  But it
makes possible a number of interesting indexes and applications beyond
what the Copyright Office itself provides through its interface.  For
example, the data could be used to complete the inventory of
"which periodicals renewed copyrights, and when", which I'm building at

    http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/firstperiod.html

To date, that page covers renewals filed before 1978, and a few
additional ones I found in manual searches of the Copyright Office
database.  I haven't yet looked at the new data, but if I can
machine-process it, it should become much easier for me to complete
the remaining relevant years.

***

Not directly related to this, but also relevant, and coincidentally
released around the same time, I have also just digitized some "leftover"
book and periodical renewals that weren't cataloged until 1978, and
weren't included in the renewals database above or in the volumes
of the Catalog of Copyright Entries digitized to date.  The new scans
put about 180 renewals for books and periodicals online for the first time,
and fill in a gap of renewal data that's fairly small, but important for
completeness.

When the Copyright Office went to a registration database in 1978,
they also issued a set of print volumes that continued the "catalog of
copyright entries" format.  Most of the contents of these volumes are
printed copies of the registration database entries.  But there were
also a small number of "leftover" registrations from before 1978, that
were filed in previous years but hadn't made it into previous Catalog
volumes.  (If you've looked at the renewal volumes from the mid-1970s on,
it's fairly clear that the copyright office was having an increasingly
difficult time keeping up with cataloging entries.)

I'm not aware of print volumes of the CCE after 1978, and over the
course of the year the backlog falls off noticeably.  (For instance,
book renewals go from 95 in the first quarter to 25 in the second
quarter to 2 in the third quarter to none in the fourth; periodicals
renewals amount to 5 in the first half and 1 in the second half.)
So it appears to be safe to assume that these late entries fill the
gap between the 1977 volumes and the database, at least for the
classes of renewals I've digitized.

You can find the 1978 renewals at

    http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/1978r.html


***

Links to both of the sources mentioned above can be found from my Catalog
of Copyright Entries web page,

    http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

Thanks!

John Mark Ockerbloom