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Comment time extended on Copyright Office mandatory deposit rules
September 22, 2009 | 9:02 am
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By Paul Biba
The Copyright office has extended until October 16, 2009 the deadline to submit comments on its proposed revision to regulations on mandatory deposit for electronic works published only online. To see a listing of the comments already submitted you can look at this Resource Shelf post. Here’s a brief summary of the proposed revision:
The amendments would establish that such works are exempt from mandatory deposit until a demand for deposit of copies or phonorecords of such works is issued by the Copyright Office. They would also set forth the process for issuing and responding to a demand for deposit, amend the definition of a ‘‘complete copy’’ of a work for purposes of mandatory deposit of online–only works, and establish new best edition criteria for electronic serials available only online. The Copyright Office seeks public comment on these proposed revisions.
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Comments:
Based on what I’ve read of the notice, this new regulation is about making life easy for the Library of Congress, which is not presently equipped to handle digital documents (mainly databases, but they have decided to lump all digital documents into the same pile). It’s certainly no aid to content owners, who can just as easily send a digital document to the LoC as publish it online: Since you still have to file for copyright, and as far as I can tell, to pay for it when you file, you might as well send the document (the one exception being online databases, which are not quite as easy to encapsulate for archiving use).
Not that I want to bury LoC under a workload they can’t handle, but I think they should make the effort to separate online databases from other electronic documents and provide individual guidelines for their archiving, and continue to require deposit of other digital documents with a filing. Then they can work out how to archive databases as their resources, and the technology, allow.