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INFORMATION ABOUT

THE CATALOG OF COPYRIGHT ENTRIES

News: Google has been digitizing original copyright registrations, and plans to do more soon. See further down the page for links to their volumes.

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 will include pointers to electronic copies of renewal registrations, and textual 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

Renewal records, by year

Here is what is available online so far:

1950 - 1977 (renews 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. 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 can be found here:

Up through 1973, each page link includes 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!)

The Copyright office stopped alphabetizing book renewal records in mid-1973, making it much more difficult to search for a particular renewal record in the 1973-1977 time period using the page scans. However, searchable text transcriptions of renewals from those years are now available from Project Gutenberg, and are linked to from the years above. (You can also download all of the Gutenberg renewal transcriptions if you prefer.)

1978 - 2005 (renews 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.

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.

Original registration records

Original registration records from 1978 onward can be found in the Copyright Office database above. Google and the Internet Archive have also scanned some early years of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, which include original registration records. Below I am starting to assemble volumes for 1923 onward. Some duplicate scans exist for some of these; let me know if you want me to search for or link them (since not all the volumes below scanned perfectly).

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" portion of the 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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