USCO Electronic Registration Goes Live
By Jonathan Bailey • Jul 3rd, 2008 • Category: Articles, News
Without as much as a formal announcement, the United States Copyright Office (USCO) pushed their Electronic Copyright Office (ECO) system live on June 21.
The system, which has been in beta testing for nearly a year, enables copyright holders to register their works with the USCO online. This lowers the cost of registration to $35 and, theoretically, speeds up the registration process.
The move to push the system live was not accompanied by any announcement on the USCO site, but rather, by simply moving the ECO link to the middle of the page, replacing the previous information about registering via mail, and pointing the “registration” tab to the ECO system.
According to the site, paper forms are still available but can not be downloaded on the site. Instead, one has to request that the USCO mail them copies in order to receive them. Also, I still have electronic copies of many of the paper forms if anyone needs them and they can also be found elsewhere on the Web.
I reviewed the ECO system previously and updated it shortly after. However, it appears that the ECO system, from my brief look at it since, has not made any significant improvements from those reviews, leaving it a severely flawed system.
Still, it is worth noting that the system is available for everyone and that it is functional. If anyone has been holding off on registering their works with the USCO, waiting for the system to come online, your wait is now over.
However, I can only hope that far more radical changes will be forthcoming.
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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Note–eCO registration actually went live on July 1, 2008, not June 21. If you subscribed to the Copyright newsnet email, an announcement did go out on June 30, but I can’t say whether they publicized this anywhere else.
They actually did it quite sneakily. I didn’t get the announcement, I must not be subscribed to that list anymore, but if you visit their page about the ECO system here: http://www.copyright.gov/eco/index.html You can see at the bottom that it was revised on the 21st of June. It seems likely that they made the changes, tested it “live” for a few days and then made the announcement.
Regardless, if we are to believe the datestamp on the site, which should be accurate, the changes were made on the 21st, not the 1st. Still, it is a case of splitting hairs. How and when they chose to roll it out is not as important as the fact they did…
Thank you for the information though. I’ll have to make sure my email is on that list!
Its a great idea to make it all online, it will make things a lot quicker and easier.
Its a great idea to make it all online, it will make things a lot quicker and easier.
Its a great idea to make it all online, it will make things a lot quicker and easier.