When the U.S. Copyright Office’s Electronic Copyright Office (ECO) system went online in July of 2008, it was supposed to revolutionize and modernize the way the USCO did business.

However, as a recent article in the Washington Post has pointed out, the results have been less than stellar.

Since the launch of the ECO system, which reportedly cost $52 million to create and took several years to develop and test, the time it takes to get a copyright registration certificate from the USCO has tripled, up from 6 months to a whopping 18. This means that, if you filed a registration today, you would not get your certificate until at least November 2010.

Even worse, the USCO is only falling farther behind. It has the capacity to complete only 7,000 registrations per week but receives over 10,000. That means every seven days it works, the USCO falls behind another three and there is no end in sight. The number of registrations keep increasing the the USCO’s capacity keeps falling farther behind the curve.

But how did this happen and what does this mean for the future of the USCO? The answers aren’t very clear but they are definitely very painful.

Redefining “Epic Fail”

The new ECO system was supposed to make the process of filing registrations and receiving confirmation significantly easier and faster. It was supposed to save copyright holders time and money (by reducing the fees on electronic registrations from $45 to $35) and increase the capacity of the USCO to meet rising needs. So what went wrong?

The new system has been plagued with two separate issues. The first was a tactical error. The USCO assumed that the vast majority of copyright holders would use the electronic system and scuttled the old paper system, which allowed processing of paper registrations within 6 months. Instead, the current paper system requires physical copyright registrations to be entered by hand, a time-consuming process. (Note: The USCO does have a form CO that uses a barcode system, however, it is the older forms, such as TX, that are still the most popular due to their familiarity.)

This is the reason for the extreme delays on paper registrations and those delays have spilled over to electronic ones, which currently take at least six months (though it was supposed to only take one).

The second problem is, to be quite frank, that the ECO system sucks. Not only is it difficult to use, time consuming to register with and outright ugly, but the system has a nasty tendency to crash (both on filers and on those trying to process registrations) and registrations seem to disappear within it.

The system is a complete failure. At best, the system was obsolete, overpriced and poorly-designed. Considering that private non-repudiation systems such as Numly, MyFreeCopyright and Copyright Registry all have more features, easier interfaces and better compatibility with existing Web technologies, the ECO system is a multi-million dollar waste.

However, the ECO system has not just made copyright holders wait longer and and become a multi-year inconvinience, it is having a direct impact in the courtrooms. At least one case, Specific Software Solutions, LLC v. Institute of Workcomp Advisors, LLC, has been thrown out on jurisdictional grounds because the copyright registration had not been processed, even though, by most estimations, it had long since been filed.

This is having an extreme negative impact on copyright holder’s ability to protect their works in court and even the Library of Congress’ inspector general says that the backlog “threatens the integrity of the U.S. copyright system.”

In short, when the USCO flipped on the ECO system, the entire copyright registration system came crashing down. It’s been an open secret in copyright circles and, now, almost a year later, it has reached a point where no one can ignore it.

The USCO’s Fixes

From the current crisis, only two things are clear:

1. The status quo can not stand.
2. The USCO can not provide the solution.

The USCO, in its defense, is trying to fix the problem. First, they have brought in 17 more copyright registrars, bringing the number up to 115, in a bid to increase the amount they can handle. They are raising the price of paper registrations $20 to $65, while keeping electronic ones at $35, in a bid to steer more to the electronic system. Finally, they claim to be working on an overhaul of the electronic system that they hope will fix the problems that have plagued it.

Unfortunately, none of it will work.

The 17 new registrars only equal a 17% increase in capacity at a time when they are a full 40% behind. It would take at least another 20 registrars, in terms of manpower, to keep up with the current demand, saying nothing about future. Second, raising the price on the paper registrations will have no effect so long as the electronic system is difficult to use. Where I can file a paper registration in a few minutes via paper (especially via a Short Form TX), it can take hours to do one online. Paper filing is still a better deal.

Finally, the overhaul of the system is unlikely to address the major problems with it. Though it may fix the bugs and kinks, it seems unlikely that the new system will be easier to use or less confusing.

There is a good reason why most copyright registration services still use paper forms, in particular the old ones, they are a better deal, more familiar and more reliable. Tweaks to the ECO system and a $20 price increase will not change that.

The copyright registration, barely working before the ECO system, is now almost hopelessly broken.

The Future of the USCO

So this raises the question of where does the USCO go from here? Their failures put the brakes on the whole of the copyright system and their measures to fix the problem are, on their face, inadequate.

There are only two solutions that are available and both would require radical reforms to the way copyright is handled in the U.S.

The first solution is an ICANN-like copyright registration system, first proposed by Dan Heller. This system would end the USCO monopoly on copyright registrations and would allow private companies, under strict regulation, to process copyright regulations.

This would eliminate many, if not all, of the problems with the current system. The processing potential would be increased many fold, registrations could be integrated with new Web technologies (like RSS), costs would drop and turnaround would speed up. But while it would fix the mess created by the ECO system, it would not fix other issues the presence of the USCO alone creates in the digital age.

Instead, the more long term solution would be to eliminate the requirement for registration before filing a suit.

Currently, there is no such requirement for works created outside the U.S., meaning that the vast majority of all copyrighted works do not have this requirement, and it is only the U.S. that has this requirement all. The Berne convention was supposed to eliminate the use of copyright formalities and no other nation (that I am aware of) has a system like the USCO where you have to register a work before filing suit. This ensures that all copyright holders, whether they have registered or not, have the same access to the courts.

While I agree that the USCO registration requirement is not a large burden, especially when stacked up against the burden of filing a suit, but it appears that it is also a burden on the government and, with the recent failures at the USCO, it threatens to cripple the whole copyright system in the U.S. (save for those who can afford the expedited filing fee of $685).

If the USCO wanted to serve copyright holders and “promote the progress of science and useful arts”, it would petition to remove itself from the requirements for jurisdiction.

Simply put, the USCO is costing our government money, it has not operated in the black since 1948 and currently only recoups 57% percent of its budget. Even the registration system does not pay for itself, recouping only 95% of its costs.

But these financial shortfalls are only a small part of the USCO’s burden. Where once the USCO was merely an expensive annoyance, it is now outright dangerous. Copyright holders are being hurt and it is damaging even the most diligent copyright holder’s ability to protect themselves in court.

It’s time for it go.

Bottom Line

The USCO has, in every meaning of the word, failed. With a miracle effort it might make itself the same antiquated system it was a few years ago, but it would be even more out of place and irrelevant. At the very least, it is time to restructure the way copyrights are registered and it is likely time for it to be done away with altogether.

There is a need for rational, sensible copyright reform in the face of changing technology. One of the first steps is going to be getting rid of dated and archaic systems, such as the current USCO one, and then look at making reforms to the law that can both protect author’s rights while bringing them into balance with the new era.

The system we have right now is broken. Two years ago it was mere annoyance, now it is a serious problem.

The only good news is that the effective date of registration is when it arrived at the USCO and copyright in a work is created when it is fixed into a tangible medium of expression. That means the extreme delay only delays a copyright holder’s date in court. However, the longer one waits, the more evidence gets destroyed, the more damage that is done by the infringement.

These delays are bad news for rights holders, there is no way around it.

With the likelihood of some form of an orphan works bill being passed sometime within the next few years, visual artists, whose works are not easily searched for, have been worried that it could lead to them losing some of their rights to their works.

However, several companies have been working on technology solutions to the orphan works problem, both to reduce the need for an orphan works bill and to prevent works from becoming orphans needlessly. The hope is that by creating search tools and indexes to locate copyright holders of images, artists that take adequate steps will have little to no reason to worry about their work becoming an orphan.

One such company is StockPhotoFinder.com, which has launched a new beta service The Copyright Registry. Though The Copyright Registry’s site may not look like much, it actually belies a powerful set of tools that could help artists and publishers, especially stock artists, keep their works from being mistaken as an orphan.

The question is whether this service will gain traction, if so, will it be useful enough to entice artists and searchers alike to use it.

How it Works

The Copyright Registry, which is not affiliated in any way with the Copyright Office nor is it a substitute for a copyright registration, actually has several different components.

However, the main functionality of the site requires you to either install a bookmarklet in your browser or paste a URL into a form on their home page. The site will then go through the page and extract all of the image, letting you select which works you wish to mark.

If you do not have an upgraded account, you’ll be able to view who has been tagged as the copyright holder/aritst of various images. You’ll also be able to edit or add such tags to work, provided a formal claim has not been made. Should anyone else run another copy of that image through the service, even if it is from another site, they will see the information that you added identifying the owner.

The idea is that, should anyone be interested in using that image but be uncertain of who the copyright holder, they can run the image through the service and get the needed information. For the most part, the service works in a wiki-like format where anyone can add or alter information. Copyright disputes, should they arise, will be handled with a dispute resolution policy similar to ICANN’s Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy.

The exception to the wiki format is with authenticated accounts. Those who pay $25 per year and provide additional personal information can put a formal claim on a work and “lock out” others from altering that information. Though a system such as this could easily be abused, especially since $25 would not discourage a person with bad intentions from claiming multiple works as their own and locking out non-member copyright holders, it also guards against abuse by anonymous users.

The service also keeps track of where the images it finds are used on the Web. It only looks for exact copies of the images, meaning even slight modifications of the image could throw off the detection system. The system, right now. focuses mostly on finding matches that have been processed via the bookmarklet and/or form, but there are plans to begin spidering the Web at large to look for additional matches.

The entire system works without uploading any images to the service, only fingerprints are stored, and that should help the site scale neatly even as more and more images are added to the site.

The system also has support for PLUS metadata embedded within images, though not EXiF or any other metadata at this time.

Veripixel

Another interesting element of the service is its new copyright management information tool, Veripixel. Veripixel adds a barely visible barcode to an image in the upper-left hand corner. However, since it is a full-color barcorde it is able to use only nine pixels, all in one row, to dispaly and read the data.

Here is a sample of Veripixel using the top of a large picture of Marilyn Monroe. Notice the highlighted part in the upper left hand corner (You may wish to click the link and open up the full image).

Now here are the pixels zoomed in very tight.

The pixels are a code that instantly tell The Copyright Registry which image it is and who the copyright owner is as the script looks for those pixels before matching against the fingerprint. With those nine pixels, if left intact, the registry has all it needs to determine the owner of a photograph or image. Though they can be easily removed, knowingly doing so for malicious purposes is a violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and can be sued for.

However, Veripixels is a side project for The Copyright Registry and is not needed in order for the system to function. Still, it is an interesting idea and a free service for all to use.

Drawbacks and Limitations

Though there are a lot of reasons to get excited about The Copyright Registry. There are some kinks that need to be worked out and issues that would be better off resolved. They include the following:

1. Site Apearance: Though it is in beta, the site doesn’t look well put together and the usability is lacking. Though the form to sign in and add a URL are clear, it isn’t easy for a first-time user to understand how to use the site. Even the video, embedded below, only demonstrates the bookmarklet system.
2. Tagging Issues: The process of tagging images is slow. If you add a Flickr URL, for example, it will pull every single image on the page, no matter how small. This includes the logo, the avatar, the thumbnails from the photostream and much more. You may have to wade through four or five pages of small images before finding the one large one that you want. You can overcome this by pasting in only the actual image URL or by using the bulk import tools, which will be available to authenticated members shortly. However, the lack of intelligence on the script’s part in detecting which images are the highest priority can be frustrating.
3. Uncertain Future: The site is going to have something of a chicken and egg problem. For the Registry to be considered part of a “reasonable” search, as was discussed in the last drafts of the orphan works bill, it must be widely used by a lot of artists. However, until it is part of such a search, artists have little motivation to use it. The site hopes to overcome this through partnerships with stock photography agencies and larger artists. That may be enough to “jump start” the cycle of artist use and reasonable search.
4. Exact Matching Only: However, the biggest limitation that I see is that the matching performed by the service is exact only. If an image is modified even slightly, it will register as an entirely knew work. This means that artists could have to lay claim to many dozens of copies of their work floating around the Web just to be sure that none of the individual images become an orphan. This could be very time consuming.

In regards to the final point, it would be nice to see this service paired with a visual search, such as Tineye, to take some of that burden off. The decision to focus on exact matching is understandable, especially when you start looking into fair use issues and that the site was never designed to track or prevent copyright infringement, just to aid those who want to the right thing and license images properly.

But with the way copyrighted works are passed around on the Web, if anyone wishes to do the right thing but has the wrong version of the image (unless the Veripixel is intact), then there is a problem. The sad truth is that every popular image has multiple versions on the Web, if someone doesn’t search for the artist’s original, it may still appear to be an orphan.

I’m hoping that the first two aspects of the site will be fixed as the site moves out of beta, they both should be relatively trivial fixes. The third problem seems to be well-addressed already but the fourth may be a problem that plagues the registry for some time to come. Though a strategic partnership could probably solve it, it is unclear if they will do so.

Bottom Line

Overall, the Copyright Registry is an interesting service. Though it has much of the same functionality and structure as Numly and even MyFreeCopyright, it is well-targeted at artists and photographers, especially large ones with many works (at least once the bulk import tools come online).

Though I worry that the name may cause many to believe it is a formal copyright registration, despite numerous disclosures to the contrary, the idea itself is solid and most of the flaws in execution can be addressed as the site comes out of beta.

I recommend that artists at least be aware of this site and, if they have a few moments, to poke around and try it out. Registry services such as this one will likely play a major role in artists’ lives in the coming years so it is important to be familiar with the anti-orphan tools now.

Furthermore, The Copyright Registry seems to be well-poised to be one of the leaders in this field moving forward. Even if it isn’t a perfect solution, those who register and try it now will have a voice and help determine the direction it grows.

Video

Find The Creator and Copyright Owner of Uncredited Works from Any Website from c-registry on Vimeo.

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.