TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

The Catalog of Copyright Entries

By Paul Biba

This could be an incredible resource for all who need to know copyright status. Finding copyright renewal status is a bit more complicated then one might think. From Everybody’s Library:

We’ve had copyright renewals for normal books, and periodicals, online for some years now. But we’ve been missing renewal records for one important type of literary text: the kind primarily meant for performing or proclaiming, rather than reading. And it turns out that copyright renewal records for works that aren’t books are harder to find than you’d expect: I could find no copies at all in the Philadelphia area for the years 1955-1968. So I’m grateful to Stanford for the loan of their volumes. There are still a few more years of drama renewals left to digitize, but I’m hoping to find the later volumes in local libraries.

And here’s the description of what The Online Books Page offers:

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

See whether a copyright has been registered or renewed. This can be useful for determining whether a work published after 1922 is now in the public domain. For instance, copyrights for works first published before 1964, and first published in the US, that were not registered and renewed in a timely manner, have now expired into the public domain. (Some material that was first published abroad may be exempt from renewal requirements.) To learn more about how to investigate the copyright status of a book, see this file.

Find out who registered a copyright, and what the copyright covers. This can be useful if you want to contact a copyright owner to ask permission to put an old work online.

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

The Copyright Office database is the place to go for registrations and renewals from 1978 onward.

A quick search of book copyright renewal records for 1923-1963 can be found at Stanford. Note that this does not include non-book renewals, or original registrations. This is based in part on an earlier database constructed by Michael Lesk and Distributed Proofreaders.

You can also download a large file of selected renewal record transcriptions for 1950-1977 from Project Gutenberg

There is also a partial set of transcriptions, broken out by category, at Philip Harper’s site.

For periodicals, you may find a list of first copyright renewals for periodicals useful. I gave a talk on this at DLF in Spring 2006. (See Powerpoint slides or web conversion — some images might not show up in the latter.)