Copyright

This circular provides guidelines for submitting a complete, accurate copyright claim. It covers: completing online and paper applications, submitting a filing fee, preparing a deposit copy, communicating with the copyright office, and determining when your registration takes effect.

This is your starting point for all things related to the registration of copyrights.

Information about copyright preregistration, including when it might be appropriate, which types of work apply, and how to preregister your copyright.

Search records of registered books, music, art, and periodicals, and other works, from 1978 on. (Works registered prior to 1978 may be found only in the Copyright Public Records Reading Room).

The U.S. Copyright Card Catalog provides an index to copyright registrations and other public records pertaining to ownership of copyrighted works. The catalog enables users to identify original copyright registration records and other U.S. Copyright Office records from 1870 through 1977. NOTE: This is a proof of concept. It is not a final version of the planned Virtual Card Catalog (VCC).

This circular provides detailed information about searching copyright registration. The copyright card catalog contains approximately 45 million cards covering the period 1870 through 1977. Registrations and records for all works dating from January 1, 1978, to the present are searchable in the online catalog,

An immensely useful resource, edited by John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania, collecting links to scans of the CCE and other resources from 1789-present.

Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database is a searchable index of the copyright renewal records for books published in the US between 1923 and 1963. Note that the database includes only renewal records, not original registrations, and only Class A (book) renewals received by the US Copyright Office between 1950 and 1992.

This ongoing project presents records of copyright ownership from the United States Copyright Office for the period from July 1891 through December 1977. The Catalogs of Copyright Entries (CCEs) are published compilations of copyright registration records cataloged in periods ranging from semiweekly to semiannually. There are 660 CCE volumes arranged by year, cataloging period, and class of material. The volumes are being digitized in reverse chronological order starting with 1977.

Links to two data repositories of registration and renewals which converted scanned images of the CCE to parsed XML. At the beginning of May (2019), we completed the full run of the "Book" volumes of the CCE dating from 1923 to 1964. The bulk of the effort has been to convert book registrations from 1923 to 1964 into XML format. This includes Part 1, Group 1 (1923–1946), Part 1A (1947–1953), and Part 1 (1953–1964) of the CCE. In addition, we have created a new version of the renewals in tab-delimited format (the same information found in the Stanford database, but parsed differently to work more accurately with the registrations).

The renewal data contains both halves of Part 1 (Groups 1 and 2, Parts 1A and 1B) as well as their combined versions for 1950-1977, parsed from a transcription made by Project Gutenberg. For the years 1978 on, there are registrations for all classes taken from a version of the renewals exported from the Copyright Office database and hosted by Google.

This page provides an overview of procedures for contacting and requesting permission from a copyright owner to use a copyrighted work, and includes some model permission request letters.

From Stanford University Libraries' Copyright & Fair Use overview.

Writers Artists and Their Copyright Holders is a database of copyright contacts for writers, artists, and prominent figures in other creative fields.

The CCC can act as an agent to help you purchase permissions to use copyrighted works for a variety of purposes.