1: Last.fm’s User Data is Useless to the RIAA

First off today, over the past few days, something of a storm has developed over Last.FM allegedly surrendering data to the RIAA. Originally, when the scandal first broke, Last.FM denied the allegations. However, new information seems to have surfaced alleging that, while Last.FM did not turn over the data, it is possible their parent company, CBS, did.

This data, which includes information about users and what they listened to has many worried about the implications as part of an RIAA legal campaign. However, as Torrentfreak points out correctly, the data would not be very useful as evidence due to the fact that it is based on ID3 tags in MP3s, something that can be easily changed or faked.

Furthermore, the RIAA has no way of determining which tracks were pirated vs. which were legitimately purchased from the data, save with prerelease tracks, making it impossible for them to build much in the way of evidence against anyone.

It may be a privacy violation, but in as far as copyright evidence goes, it does appear to be much ado about nothing.

2: The Conference Board of Canada’s Deceptive, Plagiarized Digital Economy Report

When it comes to Copyright Fail, how do you improve upon a organization researching copyright plagiarzing part of its report? Easy. Have a supposedly non-partisan, non-lobbyist group plagiarizing from the primary IP lobbying group in the U.S.

That’s exactly what Michael Geist seems to have found in the the recent report on intellectual property in the digital age. Geist found many examples of passages being lifted from various lobbying groups, often without any attribution. In his report, linked above, he lists several passages that are either identical or virtually identical to previously published studies from copyright lobbying groups, even though many of the claims were not adequately backed up.

The study was funded by various copyright lobbying groups and is expected to be used in further lobbying efforts as well as generating public attention, something the study has already done.

3: Beginning signs of the registration backlog in the courts?

Finally today, last week we reported on the recent backlog at the U.S. Copyright Office, well, we’re also seeing the first problems caused by that in the courts.

The case of Specific Software Solutions, LLC v. Institute of Workcomp Advisors, LLC has taken an odd, but not unexpected, turn as the copyright claims by Workcomp Advisors have been thrown out on jurisdictional grounds to the fact that, though a copyright registration had been filed, it had not yet been reviewed nor had the certificate been received.

As a result, the judge ruled that, without the registration or the refusal, there was no choice but to toss out that element based on jurisdictional grounds.

Obviously, IWA can refile once they get their registration, but it remains to be seen if they will.

One side note worth pointing out is that the judge in the case omitted when the registration was filed, so we do not know if it was filed a few months ago or over a year ago. The author of the post speculates that the omission was deliberate to reduce the chances of it being overturned on appeal.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

1: YouTube Ordered To Pay $1.6 Million To ASCAP

First off today, YouTube has been ordered to pay The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) $1.6 million in licensing fees for the site’s use of music in its videos.

ASCAP, which represents songwriters, lyricists and composers, collects royalties for a variety of uses of music including from night clubs and radio stations. However, there has been a great deal of confusion about what exactly companies like Google should pay in royalties. Though there was a previous ruling on the matter dealing with AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo!, the ruling applied very poorly to Google.

Both sides came into the case with very different demands. ASCAP wanted Google to pay approximately $19 million, plus another $7 million per year afterward. Google felt they should only pay approximately $100,000 with another $80,000 per year ongoing. The court split the difference and chasitized both sides for not supporting their cases. Under the current system, Google will have to pay $1.61 million now with another $70,000 per month afterward.

This case illustrates the confusing and convoluted licensing system for music right now, the same system that is hindering online radio and other Web-based music apps.

2: 2009? Wishful Thinking, Perhaps, as Backlog Mounts

If you are waiting for your copyright registration, you probably should not hold your breath. The current wait time for a new copyright registration is approximately 18 months, up from the previous 6 months, and the delays are getting worse.

At fault is with the new electronic filing system, which went live in the middle of 2008. The problem is two-fold. First, the USCO expected nearly all filers to switch to the electronic system and effectively shut down its paper registration system, making it so that paper registrations had to be filed by hand, increasing the time it took to create them. However only 55% of all filers switched to the new system, leaving 45% to continue filing via paper.

Second is problems with the electronic system itself, including issues with uploading files and confusion about how the system is supposed to work. This is a big part of the reason so few have made the switch, but has also left the USCO with a slew of customer service issues and problems.

The end result, the more efficient and streamlined electronic system has increased the delay in getting a registration 3-fold and the USCO is only getting further into the hole, processing only 7,000 applications per week even though it receives over 10,000.

It’s going to be a long wait…

3: Rewriting Canada’s Copyright Law

Finally today, do you not like Canada’s copyright law? Think you can do better? Well, give it a shot.

The Globe and Mail has created a wiki that lets anyone edit and revise their own draft of Canada’s copyright laws. On June 1st, the “final” version of the code will be sent to Ottawa for consideration.

So, if you’ve always wanted to write your own version of the copyright code for a country, now is your chance.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

Earlier this week photographer Dan Heller posted a reprise of a modest proposal to the United States Copyright Office and has received some support online.

The idea is simple. Since the USCO registration system is expensive, difficult to use and a waste of time, the USCO should open up the process and allow private companies to accept registrations in an official capacity and turn its focus on what Heller calls “oversight”.

To do this, the USCO should use an ICANN-like system for registering copyrights. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is responsible for oversight of all domain names. However, users do not actually register domain names through ICANN, instead, they use any of the ICANN-certified registrars such as GoDaddy.

The idea, according to Heller, would drive down costs and increase processing power (the USCO system is notoriously backlogged) and would encourage more artists to register their work. But would it really work? It’s a difficult question but one well worth looking at.

Benefits

It’s clear that the USCO registration system is broken. When the system was mail-only, it took months, to get a certificate of registration and the process was expensive, $45 per filing. Though the new electronic system reduced the cost by ten dollars and sped up the process some, it remains both difficult to use and, at times, hopelessly broken.

Clearly the USCO needs to remedy this and Heller’s proposal would, in theory, address many of these issues.

Consider the following potential benefits:

1. Decreased Cost: With more entities competing for copyright holder business, costs would go down. Since processing costs would be minimal, theoretically, prices would fall sharply.
2. Increased Speed: With the processing distributed among hundreds of organizations, the backlog would disappear.
3. Better Simplicity: Registrars would not have to serve all kinds of copyright holders, they could focus on photographers, writers, musicians, etc. and could greatly simplify the registration process for each. They would also be free to use AJAX and other tools to make the process faster, easier and more reliable.
4. Technological Advances: Registrars could find great ways to innovate the process. RSS Registration? Possible. Also, if Heller’s proposal is followed, a publicly-accessible database can lead a variety of search and information tools.
5. Better Enforcement: Such a system would encourage more people to register their works, enabling them to sue for infringement and thus copyright would be taken more seriously as an offense and the playing field between major copyright holder and user would be more level.

All of this would come at almost no cost to the USCO, other than the lost revenue from handling all of the registrations themselves. Taxpayers, would pay almost nothing out of pocket for the change over.

It seems like the system is a true win-win, but the more I thought about it, the more flaws came to mind.

Problems

Though I have little doubt that the system would be a great benefit over the current one, there are still a lot of issues that have to be considered.

1. Price: Though price would likely drop some, it would not be the kind of drop after Network Solutions lost its monopoly on domain names (Network Solutions charged $45 per year for most domains before the monopoly was terminated, domains are now just a few dollars at many places). The problem is that copyright registration is not like domain registrations, which recur annually with almost no additional cost on the registrar. A copyright registration is a one-time expense meaning the registrar has to recoup the entire cost of recruiting a customer on the first purchase. Furthermore processing requirements are much higher than with domains, further keeping costs higher.
2. Continued Disparity: This system would not level the playing field between big and small copyright holders, and could actually make things worse. Large copyright holders, such as the RIAA, would just purchase a copyright registrar and charge themselves a nominal rate, likely just above the USCO processing fee, and leave other copyright holders to pay retail. At least, right now, everyone puts up with the same bad system, with only a few differences. We see this issue a lot with domain names.
3. Still Too Expensive: Even if the cost of a copyright registration fell to just a dollar per post, bloggers, Flickr users, etc. would still likely find it too expensive to register all of the work. There would first have to be changes about how works could be bundled into collections and when registrations needed to be filed, in order to really make registration economical for most on the Web.
4. Increased Confusion: There is already a great deal of confusion and misinformation about what you need to do to register a copyright, bringing in hundreds of new official registrars would just make things worse.
5. Privacy Issues: There’s a huge dust up about privacy involving the whois database, the central database of the current ICANN registration system. Though you can search for copyright records and get some personal data, though not much, any such new system would have to be done with privacy in mind. Registering a domain is one thing, but a copyright shouldn’t require one to expose themselves to the world.

There is little doubt that this system would be better than the current one but I don’t think it would bring about the copyright utopia many would hope (though Heller himself made no such promise). The system would still be riddled with flaws and problems.

But even if the system were to be executed flawlessly, something that isn’t likely, it would still be a burden on copyright holders and we would still have a two-tiered system of registered and unregistered works.

At best, we would eliminate many of the worst problems with the USCO system itself, but leave behind the problems that having such a system creates.

The Only Real Solution

As I said before, the only real solution is to do away with the USCO registration process. So long as it is around most copyright holders will not know to or be able to register their works. As such, most copyright holders will be second-class citizens.

As a signatory to the Berne convention, we were supposed to have done away with all formalities for obtaining copyright protection and, though that is technically true in that you have all of the same rights to your work, unregistered works can not be sued over and it is financially impractical, in most cases, to sue for any infringement to a currently unregistered work.

The registration requirement, no matter how well-executed, only serves to punish ignorant and poor copyright holders that either do not know or can not afford to register. Furthermore, it punishes those who publish their works as soon as they are created, such as bloggers, as they can’t register before putting their works in the public sphere.

The system is imbalanced and the U.S. is currently the only major country with such a requirement. Removing the requirement would not only ensure all copyright holders were protected, but would bring the U.S. into parity with other nations.

Conclusions

The reason that we don’t get rid of the registration requirement is the same reason that we’re not going to see an ICANN-like registration system: Money and power. Though the USCO has been a money-losing proposition for many years, government agencies are notoriously slow to let go of both revenue streams and the powers/responsibilities that they have.

Would the USCO be wise to consider an ICANN-like system of registration? Sure. But they likely won’t simply because it would mean relinquishing their monopoly on copyright registrations and a severe reduction in the amount of revenue they would bring in. Though they would still likely charge a small fee per registration still (much like the 20 cent fee ICANN charges), even with the increase in likely registrations, they would not be able to make up the difference.

Though I would certainly prefer an ICAAN-style system to the current one, it would not solve the larger problems with U.S. copyright law.

There is no doubt that the registration system is hopeless broken, but it is not broken because the USCO has done a horrible job with it (though it has), it is broken because it exists at all.

However, as we have discussed before, the registration system does not fit neatly with the realities of the Web and even their new electronic system does not bring the service up to modern standards.

Still, some Webmasters may benefit from registering their works with the USCO and should consider doing so. However, registering every work is impractical and most Webmasters will gain nothing at all from a registration, no matter how frequently they do ti.

So when should a Webmaster register their work with the USCO? It’s a difficult question with no easy answers.

The Limitations to Understand

Though the advantages of a USCO registration are great, there are two limitations to such registrations that limit their usefulness to webmasters.

1. Registration has no impact on the most common copyright infringement resolution techniques (DMCA Notices, Cease and Desists, etc.)
2. It only applies to works included in the registration, not ones that came later.

These elements combine to virtually guarantee that any registration you file for your site will be useless.

You will not require a formal registration in well over 99.9% of all of your copyright disputes and, in the rare times where it might be useful, it likely will not apply. Since newer works, for most sites, are the ones more commonly infringed, the odds of the works involved being covered by your registration are slim.

The only way to keep your copyright registration relevant on a site that is active is to constantly re-register your site. However, that comes both at a high cost to one’s time and to one’s bottom line. If you register your site every three months, as some recommend, it would cost $140, even using the cheaper online service.

However, even with that system, since copyright law does not consider merely posting a work to the Web publication, but rather public display, most works posted to the Web are not eligible for the three-month grace period of registration.

Update: See this comment for more information about the issue of public display vs. publication as it pertains to the copyright registration process. Many thanks to Matt Saunders for the clarification.

This, in turn, means that at any given time, would have a three-month gap in your registration, where the newer works would not be eligible for protection until the next cycle begins. During that time, infringement of new works is ongoing.

In short, even if you took every reasonable precaution possible and spent the time and money to keep your registration up to date, you would still leave gaping holes where you would not be eligible for full protection of your work, likely until it is too late.

Exceptions to the Rule

This isn’t to say that there are no cases where a site might benefit from a copyright registration, just that most sites will not. There are at least a few situations where a webmaster can and should seriously consider making use of the USCO’s service.

However, those cases would typically be limited to sites that meet the following criteria:

1. Static Sites: Sites where the content remains largely constant or, at the very least, see a large amount of misuse of older works may benefit from registration as there is a good probability that any infringement will be of a protected work.
2. Ability and Will to Sue: Suing for copyright infringement takes a great deal of time and money. Even if you are able to recoup the costs of the suit, the energy expended may not be worth the results. You need to make sure that you are willing to go through a long, protracted legal fight that could end up going nowhere, especially if the party is in another country or can’t pay any penalties. Most people and many businesses are in no position to do that.
3. Financial Reasons to Sue: Though there are many reasons to sue for copyright infringement, courts put the most weight on the monetary damages as it is what they can most easily assess. It is important to note that damages awarded for infringement are statutory, not punitive, and thus will be related to the value of the work itself.

If you have a dynamic site and/or lack the ability or reason to actively sue infringers, most likely, a copyright registration is a waste of time and money.

The question then becomes a matter of which sites meet the criteria and become good targets for registration? The answer is surprisingly few.

Sites that Should Consider Registering

If you and your site meet the above criteria, then registering your site is probably a wise move. However, if you are looking for examples of the types of sites and content that should be registered, consider the ones below:

1. Art/Literature Sites: Content on art and literature sites tend to have longer shelf lives than those on blogs or news sites. Works on those are much more likely to be infringed after a registration is filed than on other dynamic sites.
2. Business Sites: Though a competitor copying your marketing or promotional material raises other legal issues, including unfair competition, it may be worthwhile to register the site since a great deal of time and money goes into it. Furthermore, the content, typically, does not change much making it likely that a protected work will be infringed.
3. Stand-alone Works: Any work that takes a decent amount of time and/or money to create should, if possible, be registered before it is posted to the Web. Novels, movies, music compilations, etc. should, if possible, be registered regardless of the type of site they are to be posted to.

But while these works, and others that warrant registration, may seem to cover most of the Web, the truth is that very little of the content on the Web is registered and only a small percentage of that content benefits from their more official status.

Your average blogger or Webmaster has little, if any, reason to consider registering their site with the USCO.

Foreign Authors

To take a quick aside, it is worth noting that authors in countries outside of the U.S. stand to gain very little from registering their works.

While there is some debate whether or not a foreign-born author can sue without first registering a work (Note: I am seeking clarification on this issue and will update when I get a reply), the issue is moot since, in most cases, the cost and expense of suing in a United States court would far exceed any potential gains.

Foreign authors, both legally and practically, have the least to gain from copyright registration.

Conclusions

If the question is whether or not one should register their Web page or blog with the United States Copyright Office, the answer will usually be “No”.

Though there are exceptions to the rule, there are very few sites that would significantly benefit from registering their work. The nature of the Web and the limitations of the registration system make it so that, for most webmasters, a USCO registration is a waste of both time and money.

Fortunately, most of the protections we rely upon as webmasters are ours from the moment our work is fixed into a tangible medium of expression and do not require a copyright registration. DMCA notices and desist letters are all available to us with no formalities at all.

Even if a major copyright dispute were to arise, one could likely leverage copyright management information (CMI) to sue for a previously unregistered work. Though that avenue is limited and controversial, it may provide an avenue for when registration was impossible or impractical.

However, the bottom line is U.S. copyright law does not effectively protect bloggers and others who post content to the Web. Our copyright protection is second rate to the rest of the world and, until the law changes, many of us will have our best legal avenues closed off.

The flaw is not with bloggers unwilling to protect their works, but with a system that is out of touch with realities of the Web.

A reader tipped me off to an email that is circulating from a company known as the U.S. Copyright Registry.

The email, which is sent to the administrative contact of a domain, says that:

“You are required to advise the US Copyright Registry of your intent to license this website if registration is administered through the UCR as this is your final notice.”

If you receive this email, please disregard it. Despite the official-sounding name, the U.S. Copyright Registry (UCR) is not the United States Copyright Office (USCO). Though much of the legal information contained within it is at somewhat accurate, the attempts to push you to use the UCR’s service are both unnecessary and costly.

What They Do

If you visit the UCR Web site, it is very difficult to figure out what they do. However, it is their “About Us” page where they explain their services:

“The U.S. Copyright Registry handles the entire process of registering copyright for website owners from filing the application and paying all necessary filing fees as well as depositing and submitting copies of the work to the copyright office. All government forms are reviewed extensively using our automated system for accuracy, completeness and common errors. All registration is administered by the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress.”

In short, what the service does is register your site with the USCO, handling the forms, deposits and fees. For this service, according to a representative I spoke with on the phone, the UCR charges $350, ten times the filing fee for an electronic copyright registration at the USCO itself.

In function, the service is actually very similar to C-Site by GoDaddy. However, GoDaddy’s “Express Application” service is just $71.99, including the filing fee.

However, virtually any one who can download their site to a CD can register it. While the Electronic Copyright Office system is a tangled mess, filing out a Short Form TX (PDF) is very simple and fast.

There is very little reason to consider using a service such as the UCR, especially at the price it is charging.

The UCR Response

Prior to this article, I called the UCR and spoke with both a front line representative, who gave me the basic overview of the service, and a supervisor named Thomas Young that answered my questions.

According to Young, the main function of the emails is to inform Webmasters of their intellectual property rights and that there is no intention of causing confusion. He repeatedly assured me that the official USCO Web site was at copyright.gov and that the emails were in no way an attempt to cause confusion.

I pointed out that the official USCO site address does not appear anywhere in the email, Young did not immediately respond.

Young did say that they offered the registration service but stressed that the main goal of the service was to notify and educate Webmasters to their rights.

Conclusions

When you pair a strongly-worded email with an official-sounding name and a copyright registration service that does the same function as the USCO, confusion is both inevitable and predictable.

WHile I will leave everyone to their own judgment if this service is truly a “scam”, it is clearly an email you can and should ignore.

If you want assistance with your copyright registration, there are cheaper services available. However, there is no obstacle to doing it yourself and either paying the $45 paper filing fee or the $35 electronic one.

If the service truly is only interested in notifying Webmasters of their rights, I hope that they would be willing to make changes to their language and add all of the information consumers need to make an informed decision about if and how to register their works.

As it is, they are only adding to the confusion over copyright and not helping anyone, but perhaps themselves.

The system, which is currently in beta, drew very little praise and seemed to be plagued with problems including technical, usability and speed issues.

However, in that review, I had been unable to complete a registration due to a lack of need and uncertainties about the system, leaving the review somewhat incomplete.

Earlier this week, I got the chance to complete the process as I returned to file a registration, thus giving me the chance to walk through the payment and upload process.

Unfortunately, the new experiences with the system did nothing to improve my opinion of the service and, instead, only worsened my already sour opinion of the ECO service.

Payment

When you reach the end of your registration process, before you are allowed to upload your work, you are required to pay the $35 fee for registration.

Unfortunately, the system for filing your payment is unnecessarily complex and is confusing, even for someone who regularly purchases items on the Web.

To initiate the process, you can choose to either pay with your USCO deposit account, which requires prior setup, or with your credit card/bank account.

However, clicking the “Credit Card/ACH” button takes you to a screen with nothing but the ACH information on it. The page, which is hosted on the pay.gov Web site, a site run by the U.S. Treasury, asks for your ban account and checking information first, pushing the more familiar credit card payment off of the screen, even on larger monitors.

This resulted in an extended period of confusion trying to find the credit card form with no luck. It was only on the third try that, out of frustration, I scrolled down to find it.

However, once the information was put through, things did not improve. I was then asked to enter my email address to receive a confirmation letter of the transaction. Unfortunately, you also have to agree to a terms of service for the registration and the tick mark to agree is to the right of the “I agree” sentence, not the left.

Even if you read the text on the page very carefully, it is easy to miss the checkbox and and receive an error message when submitting the form and, even when warned of the mistake, it can be hard to locate the box.

Though these might seem like minor usability issues, they turned what should have been a two or three minutes credit card purchase into a twenty minute ordeal. In the time it took me to figure out how to pay for the registration, I likely could have filled out the Short Form TX (PDF), burned the CD and written a check.

However, the ordeal did not end there. With payment secured, I was then forced to upload the work itself. But with other reviews hinting at problems with the upload process, this was easily the part I was most worried about, especially considering that the USCO already had my money and the amount was non-refundable.

Uploading

The file I was registering was a zip file approximately 100 MB in size and contained and entire Web site with images and text. I debated, based upon information I had read, breaking the file up into two parts but decided to first try the file in one shot.

Fortunately, the process went relatively smoothly. After selecting the file and giving it a title, an upload dialog box appeared and it started to transmit the file to the service.

Of all the elements to the registration process, this was the only part that struck me as remotely modern. The dialog box updated in close to real time, provided an accurate estimate of time remaining and a good approximation of upload speed.

Through the entire process, I had upload speeds of about 67 KB per second and the file took roughly 20 minutes to upload. Though it is a respectable speed, I’ve achieved much faster uploads over IM and FTP but the process was still far from sluggish or painful.

Then, once the upload finished, I received confirmation in my “case listing”. However, the case was not “closed” or marked complete. Rather, it was marked as “open” and the claim status was changed to “pending”.

Even after everything that was done, the process is not automatic and still requires human review. before the registration is finalized.

This is, perhaps, the biggest single blow to the ECO system. that all it really is is a means to same end as the mail-in system. However, rather than mailing your form and sample works in, you get to send them electronically via clunky, error-prone interface that is slower and more confusing than its paper counterparts.

Technical Errors

Something that emerged in this use of the ECO system that was not present during my earlier experiments was a slew of server and Web page errors.

It seemed that, as I went through the system, every other page produced some variation of the “server busy” error. The other sites I was on at the time functioned well, including the main USCO Web site, and the errors seemed to be limited exclusively to anything on the ECO system that required the running of a script.

Given that the ECO system is, technically, in a private beta, this is embarrassing. If they are having issues with server load, they could, theoretically, just reduce the number of people allowed to register for the service until they get caught up.

Unfortunately, they either haven’t done that or did it too late. The system seems to be getting pounded now and, if it moves at all, it does so reluctantly.

The good news is that these slowdowns didn’t affect upload speed significantly and the errors did not cause any data loss. The system was smart enough to pick up where it left off every time.

Still, it made for more than a few “heart stopping” moments.

Conclusions

The premise of the ECO system is that, when compared to the current mail-in system, it is supposed to be faster, cheaper and more reliable. Unfortunately, it fails miserably on two out of three accounts.

Though the system will save you ten dollars plus postage on your registration, you’ll spend more time filling out the forms and put up with a very buggy system in order to make it happen. Though I’m certain later registrations will be easier for me as it should have all of my data stored, there is no excuse for making this system more complicated than the one it is supposed to replace.

However, even with that being said, I will probably find myself using the ECO system in the future, so long as the current registration goes through in a reasonable amount of time. Though I don’t register many works due to the nature of the Web, if I have to do it, this will likely be the way to go.

The reason though has nothing to do with the ECO system itself, but with issues I’ve had in recent months trying to submit deposit copies. Twice now I have had burned CDs ether be destroyed or lost by the USCO. At least with electronic registration, that is not an issue.

However, if this is the system that is supposed to bring the archaic USCO into the 21st century, it is a dismal failure. Between the dated technology that doesn’t work properly, poor usability and a sheer complexity of the process, this system only shows how out of step the USCO is with the modern world.

It is long overdue for the USCO’s place in the copyright landscape to be re-evaluated and changed. The failure of the ECO system to provide a decent registration system only serves as the nail in the coffin of that argument.

To fill the gap between the expensive and slow USCO system and the reality of the Web, several unofficial non-repudiation services have cropped up including Numly and Registered Commons.

However, these services have struggled to balance the elements a non-repudiation service. Numly, for example, is easy, fast has great plugins but the price point drives many away. Registered Commons, on the other hand, is thorough and free, but difficult to use.

However, a service known as My Free Copyright hopes to improve upon these systems not only by providing a completely free service, but one that is a better fit for your traditional blogger.

Fortunately, they seem to be well on their way as their service already offers some very enticing features.

How it Works

MyFreeCopyright works like any other non-repudiation service. After registering for an account, through a very short and simple form, you are then taken to a screen that allows you to choose what kind of work you want to protect.

There you are presented with three options.

The first lets you upload a file for registration, including, audio video and eBook files. The second option will allow you to registered a blog or a podcast via the site’s RSS feed. The third reads an HTML pages, extracts the text from it, and creates a registration similar to the one it creates for a blog entry.

If the item protected is a file or a HTML page, a single registration is created. This registration includes the text of the page, if an HTML work, a hash of the registered content, a date/time stamp of when the work was submitted and a My Copyright Number, or MCN, for easy reference.

If the registration is an RSS feed, then all of entries in the feed are indexed separately and all future updates to the feed are picked up automatically on a daily basis. Each entry is given its own registration, including MCN, hash and date stamp.

With each registration, you can opt to set the registration to private, meaning only you can view the content, and assign a Creative Commons License to the work.

The theory in all of this is that, if there is a copyright dispute regarding one of your works, this service can help support your claim of ownership by verifying that it was created and uploaded at a certain date and time. Anything that comes after will have an uphill battle to prove its authenticity.

Though it doesn’t provide the legal protections of a USCO registration and such a registration would still be necessary to sue in a Federal court, MFC can still provide some verification of ownership, especially if the dispute does not head to the courtrooms.

Lots to Love

When looking at MFC as a service, there are a lot of things to like about it.

First and foremost, as the name suggests, MFC is completely free. The site is free to use for unlimited registrations and has no advertising on the site. Though the owner of the site, Matt Whittaker, has said he plans to offer some paid services in the new year, he has promised to keep the basic services free forever.

Second, the site interacts with RSS feeds automatically, enabling bloggers to have “set and forget” registrations without having to install a plugin. This avoids a complication that is shared by both Numly and Registered Commons. This seems like a natural use for RSS and, though the system could be improved, the concept is solid, especially for those with full feeds.

Third, the service provides a simple button and badge that you can include in your site, or even embed into your RSS feed. This can be a great way to publicize your protection and, if you don’t wish to use the button, if you can use a text link to the MFC page for your site. If you’re using this on an RSS feed, a visitor can rummage through your entire blog by month, not just one entry at a time.

All in all, a visitor to the MCF registration page will find it much better organized than pretty much any other non-repudation service.

Finally, the site itself is very easy to use and very straightforward. You can easily register in a few seconds and set up your first item for protection immediately after. At no point did I find myself stuck or lost when registering various works.

However, though the service is solid, this isn’t to say that it is perfect, there are still some issues with it, as minor as they may be.

Caveats

Before jumping at the chance to use MFC, there are a few things to bear in mind.

First, the RSS service, though convenient, could be improved. As it functions right now, you either have to manually log in and have the service check your feed, up to once per hour, or wait and have it do it during the automatic check, which takes place late evening Eastern Time.

Though manually updating the feed is a minor inconvenience, requiring you to log in to your account and click a link, it is easily forgotten. However, the automatic update can occur as much as a day after the post goes live, often well after scrapers have gotten ahold of the content and republished it.

This feature would be better expanded either through the development of a plugin, which Whittaker has said he is working on, or, even more ideally, through a pinging service that bloggers can add to be automatically updated.

Second, the simplicity of MFC means that there are no real advanced features to the site. This limits the amount of meta data affixed to the content itself such as author, licensor or copyright holder contact information. This might limit the effectiveness of the service for dealing with orphan works issues, if only marginally.

Third, when registering your work, you need to be careful to set your registration to “private”. MFC, by design, allows search engines to index its registration pages including the content on them. This can create duplicate content on the Web and cause some of the same problems a non-repudation service is supposed to help deal with.

Finally, during my retesting of MFC today, I noticed a few minor bugs in the system. The first being that my Creative Commons license on my PT registration was not being affixed to new entries, just old ones, and that the entries were being displayed out of order. Newer entries were being posted at the end of the line, something that is counter to how most blogs present information.

(Update: The two bugs mentioned above have been fixed, see comments below.)

However, these issues are relatively minor and all of them can easily be addressed in updates of the site. Overall, MFC has the right idea and is headed down the correct path.

Conclusions

MFC is targeted at your everyday blogger and Webmaster who doesn’t need an extremely powerful non-repudiation system and is willing to trade a few advanced features for simplicity and price tag of free.

Though the issues with RSS updating may limit the service’s functionality in some cases, it is still useful in most instances where a human plagiarist is involved. Fortunately, those are the cases most likely to become a major dispute requiring non-repudiation.

For bloggers seeking a fast, easy and free non-repudiation service, MyFreeCopyright is an almost ideal choice.

Considering that it is easy, free and automatic, there is little reason not to use it. Since you don’t have to paste the MFC information to your site in any way, no one has to know that you are even using it.

All in all, it is an extra layer of protection that can easily be added to any site or blog. It makes sense to protect yourself as much as possible and, if you aren’t using another non-repudation service, this may well be the one for you.

The system, in theory, is supposed to make registering your work with the USCO easier, faster and cheaper than the traditional “file by mail” system that the USCO has used for decades.

But how does the system compare with existing services, such as Godaddy’s c-Site and is it enough to save the USCO from becoming a complete dinosaur in the digital age?

Well, last week I received an invite to beta test the system and sought to answer those questions for myself. What I found was an inadequate system that never failed to disappoint.

Obtaining the Invite

Getting the invite to test the system was a relatively painless process. I was on the USCO site for unrelated business and filled out the brief form to request becoming a beta tester. Within 24 hours, I had an email inviting me to join the test and instructions for signing on.

The email gave me instructions to register for an account at a hidden page on the USCO site. The registration was spread across four screens. The first asked me for my name, time zone, username and password. The second asked me to fill in my personal contact information, address, phone, etc. The third had me agree to a terms of service and the fourth was a confirmation of the first three screens.

With the account registered, I could easily log in and see the interface, but I had to confirm the registration before I could actually do anything. Confirming the registration required me to reply to my acceptance email with my username and other information so they could activate the account.

After waiting another day, the account was activated. I was able to log back in and start the registration process. However, it was then that the chinks in the armor began to become very clear.

Going Through the Motions

Once your access to the system is confirmed, you can then begin to go through the motions of registering your work.

When you first log in to your account, you are greeted with the screen below (click for larger screen).

Once you click the “Start a New Registration” screen, you are taken to a page that provides you an overview of the three steps that will follow, filling out the application, making payment and submitting your deposits. You then click the “Start Registration” button and begin the application process.

The application process takes place over a series of eleven steps, starting with the type of work and ending with a review of the submission. The entire time you’re moving through the application process, a box, such as the one to the left, is displayed on the screen showing you where you are in the process.

Each step is relatively short and closely mirrors the information that is entered on the paper forms. Navigation between the steps is handled through a navigation bar displayed above each page’s form.

In addition to allowing you to move back and forward through the steps, the navigation bar allows you to save the registration at any time, letting you to access it through their account management tools. Also, in some sections, it has the ability to “Add Me”, which will fill in your provided information instead of having you retype it.

All totaled, the application process takes about thirty minutes the first time you go through it. Subsequent times, when you’re more comfortable with the format and the steps, can take as little as ten.

Once you have completed your application, you are then taken to a page on Pay.gov, which is a site operated by the United States Treasury. There you are given the opportunity to pay the $35 fee either via checking account or credit card.

Unfortunately, that is where I had to stop. Though my original intention was to register this site using the service, problems and concerns with the registration prevented me from spending the money on the registration.

Issues with the Service

Many of the problems with the eCO service are apparent just by looking at the few screenshots I provided. The submission process is clumsy, the layout is ugly and the language is, in places, very confusing.

It was clearly a system designed for people already very familiar with the copyright registration process and, even though I have successfully registered many things with the USCO, this system left me scratching my head at least a few times.

The system also suffers from some very severe technical issues. For one, the service is incompatible with some browsers. It has only been tested on IE and Netscape 7.2, requires modifications to Firefox settings for it to work in that browser, seems to work with Opera in my testing and completely chokes on Safari. This is unacceptable considering that the entire process is done using almost nothing but HTML and basic JavaScript.

But worse still is the extreme slowness of the service and regular error messages. Several times when I tried to sign on I was told that I was already logged into the system and couldn’t enter it again. Other times, I experienced random, and rather cryptic, server error messages.

Most frustrating of all was that clicking the “Add Me” button, as described above, took the system upwards of a minute to add my data in. Once, it took so long my session timed out before the data was put in.

However, the deal breaker, for me, was the complete and total lack of effective documentation for the service. When I reached the point where they were asking for my credit card number, I realized that I had no idea how to prepare my site for upload.

I knew from reading other reviews that the site would have to be uploaded in a zip file and that there had been hiccups with the upload process, but I had no clue what kind of files it would require me to reformat the site as an RTF, TXT or PDF file. In the past, I’ve submitted HTML documents burned to a disk with no problems, but this system seems to have changed many of the rules.

So, I left the eCO system at the altar, my registration complete save the payment and the upload.

My Thoughts

I’ve been very critical of the USCO over the years I’ve run this site and repeatedly called for its closure or, at the very least, the elimination of the registration requirement.

However, I held out a glimmer of hope that the eCO system might modernize the USCO enough to be practical in the Internet age. Unfortunately, those hopes have been dashed pretty thoroughly.

This is not an update to the USCO, it is just a means for them to accept and process copyright applications more quickly. It only brings the USCO up to date if you assume that the date is 1995.

The eCO system does not take advantage of new technologies such as RSS or AJAX. It is not user-friendly or significantly more cost-effecient. It is not approachable to anyone who has never filed a registration before and, worst of all, it does nothing to make the process of registering a Web site more clear.

In short, it is nothing but fast lane for traditional copyright holders. The RIAA types will enjoy this system greatly and will forgive its flaws because it speeds up the process and saves them money. But bloggers, Webmasters and smaller rightsholders will miss out on the revolution.

This system held so much promise when it was announced. However, it is now just another government failure when trying to adapt copyright law to the Web.

Conclusions

To be fair, we must remember that this system is just a beta. However, as my own experiences in government work tells me, the powers that be don’t beta test until they feel they are very close to a final product. If that is the case, then this is nothing but a colossal failure.

What makes it so embarrassing is that online copyright registration services have existed for years. These services, which have charged a premium to process postal copyright registrations, are, by in large, fast, user-friendly and easy.

Even non-repudiation systems such as Registered Commons and Numly provide a much higher level of convenience, speed and effectiveness. The only thing they lack is any legal authority.

However, it is that legal authority that causes most of the major problems with the eCO. By having to comply with a set of laws that don’t fit neatly with the Internet, the eCO system goes from a painless registration to a cumbersome application of antiquated laws.

The eCO system is an attempt to shoehorn 1978 copyright law into a 2008 copyright reality. It just doesn’t work.

Rating

Out of a ten I have to give the system a three. It is better than no electronic copyright registration system at all, but that is not saying much.