INFORMATION ABOUT
THE CATALOG OF COPYRIGHT ENTRIES
News: Stanford now has a searchable database of book copyright renewals. See below for more details.
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
Renewal records, by year
Here is what is available online so far:
1950 - 1977 (renews copyrights from 1922 - 1950)
These years are not yet in an official database; however, volunteers
have scanned renewal page images for many book-related categories.
See also the transcriptions and indexes above.
Books may be covered under copyrights in related categories.
(For instance, if a portion of a book first appeared in a magazine, it
may still be copyrighted under the magazine's copyright even if the
book's copyright was not renewed.)
A few renewals for previous years were not cataloged until the 1978
issue; relevant page images for books and periodicals are linked to below.
The page images can be found here:
- 1950 (everything except music)
- 1951 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals, drama, artwork)
- 1952 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals, drama, artwork)
- 1953 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1954 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1955 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1956 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1957 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1958 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1959 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1960 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1961 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1962 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1963 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1964 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1965 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1966 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1967 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1968 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1969 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1970 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1971 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1972 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1973 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1974 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1975 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1976 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1977 (books, periodicals, contributions to periodicals)
- 1978 (books and pamphlets, periodicals)
Up through 1973,
each page link includes a summary of the alphabetical
range covered by the page, making it easier for people to find
relevant pages in their search.
(Thanks to Philip Harper for producing summaries for 1955-1957, and 1959-1963,
and to Meredith Dixon for producing summaries for 1964 and 1965!)
The Copyright office stopped alphabetizing book renewal records in mid-1973,
making it much more difficult to search for a particular renewal record
in the 1973-1977 time period using the page scans. However, searchable
text transcriptions of renewals from those years are now available
from Project Gutenberg, and are linked to from the years above.
(You can also download
all of the Gutenberg renewal transcriptions if you prefer.)
1978 - 2005 (renews copyrights from 1950 - 1977)
You can see copyright registration records from 1978 onward from the
Copyright Office's
Copyright Records web site.
This will include renewals for copyrights from 1951 onward (and some, but
not all, renewals for 1950 copyrights),
as well as original registrations from 1978
onward.
For information on how to use the system, see
this file.
Note that due to changes in copyright law, all works copyrighted in 1964
or later automatically had their copyrights renewed, whether or not
a renewal was filed.
If you'd like to work with the database as a whole, and are willing
to run some code to process it, here is
an unoffical copy of the Copyright Office data from Public.resource.org. Google has also made available an XML version of these records, slightly massaged.
Original registration records
Original registration records from 1978 onward can be found in the
Copyright Office database above. Google has also scanned some early
years of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, which include original
registration records. Below I am starting to assemble volumes for
1923 onward. Some duplicate scans exist for some of these; let me
know if you want me to search for or link them
(since not all the volumes below scanned perfectly).
- 1929:
- 1930:
- 1931:
- 1932:
- Part 1, Group 1: Books (Nos. 1-61)
- Part 1, Group 1: Books (Nos. 62-111)
- Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Contributions to Periodicals, Lectures, Maps (Nos. 1-7)
- Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Contributions to Periodicals, Lectures, Maps (Nos. 8-12)
- Part 1, Group 3: Dramatic Compositions; Motion Pictures (bound with 1931)
- Part 2: Periodicals (bound with 1933)
- Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 1-8)
- Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 9-12)
- Part 4: Works of Art. Etc. (bound with 1933 and 1934)
- 1933:
- 1934:
- 1935:
- Part 1, Group 1: Books (Nos. 1-67)
- Part 1, Group 1: Books (Nos. 68-126)
- Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Contributions to Periodicals, Lectures, Maps (Nos. 1-8)
- Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Contributions to Periodicals, Lectures, Maps (Nos. 9-12)
- Part 2: Periodicals (bound with 1934)
- Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 1-9)
- Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 10-12)
- Part 4: Works of Art. Etc. (bound with 1936 and 1937)
- 1936:
- 1937:
- Part 1, Group 1: Books (Nos. 1-60)
- Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Contributions to Periodicals, Lectures, Maps (Nos. 1-7)
- Part 1, Group 2: Pamphlets, Contributions to Periodicals, Lectures, Maps (Nos. 8-12)
- Part 1, Group 3: Dramatic Compositions; Motion Pictures
- Part 2: Periodicals (bound with 1936)
- Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 1-9)
- Part 3: Musical compositions (Nos. 10-12)
- Part 4: Works of Art. Etc. (bound with 1935 and 1936)
- 1938:
- 1939:
- 1940:
- 1941:
- 1942:
- 1943:
- 1944:
- 1945:
- 1946:
More to come shortly (January 2009).
Credits
This work is supported by the University of Pennsylvania Library,
which hosts this site and supports its editor,
by the Universal
Library Project
at Carnegie Mellon, which scanned page images for the "books" portion
of the
renewal volumes,
the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries,
which provide much of the storage space for the scanned images,
by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh,
the Free Library of Philadelphia,
and the Newark Public Library,
which have supplied volumes to be scanned,
by Google Books, which has
scanned many of the Catalog of Copyright Entries volumes,
by Philip Harper and Project Gutenberg, who are providing
transcriptions of some of these records,
and by volunteers and donors
from the Internet community.
Volunteer scanners of renewal pages include Dianne Bean, Mary Mark Ockerbloom,
John Mark Ockerbloom, Juliet Sutherland, and Greg Weeks.
If you'd like to help out, write
onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu to find out more how you can get involved
with this project. Thanks to everyone helping out. (Thanks also
to the Copyright Office for compiling this material in the first place,
and for maintaining the online records from 1978 onward.)
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Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom (onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu)
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