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| HARD TO GET: Robert Burch got arrested while using a tripod to take this twilight photo of Ghana's Independence Arch in Accra. This image was stolen more than 100 times. |
Take away a creator's ability to prosper from his works, and you take away an incentive to create. That's where copyright comes in. Its purpose: to encourage creativity by protecting property.
For more than 100 years, the U.S. Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, has been processing every copyright application (30 million claims, and counting) by hand. It now gets about 600,000 applications each year for everything from software to cereal-box copy. And its procedures have been in need of an update for quite a while.
A bill to modernize copyright law has been struggling through Congress for years, hung up on provisions governing "orphan works" -- photos thought to be abandoned to the public domain. Photographers are pushing for tougher requirements for "due diligence" in seeking the owner of a photo, and for the Copyright Office to create a searchable database of copyrighted photos using image-recognition software.
Under the current registration system, you log onto the Copyright Office website, download the right form, fill it out (not always simple), either print or load your photos on a CD, and mail the whole shebang to Washington, D.C. There, your envelope gets irradiated to kill anthrax, slowing down its delivery by days. Then it's hand-sorted and routed to an office where overburdened clerks separate valid claims from those they must help applicants straighten out.
Want to help reshape the process? The Copyright Office is developing an online registration program, eCO (Electronic Copyright), now in the beta testing phase. Some 400 testers a week are signing up to try eCO and to advocate making pictures searchable. To join them, go to copyright.gov.
I did it. "Your new user account with the electronic Copyright Office (eCO) has been activated." I was thrilled to get this e-mail, as I'd already created a folder with 50 digital images to register.
The process: Fill out a series of application screens, pay the registration fee ($35, a $10 online discount), and upload your photos. You can place an unlimited number of images in a group filing for the same price. But beware: Sending 5,000 photos means breaking them up into many transmissions, requiring a 19th-century level of patience.
I ran into some tiny bugs, but the system only launched in June 2007. By the end of November, it had handled more than 18,000 filings, 3,283 by photographers. Almost all the photos came in groups of up to several hundred images each.
The application screens are easy -- until you're asked if the pictures have ever been published. The government's definition of "published" was adopted in 1976. If you've posted pictures on a website in order to sell them, they're considered published, but if you've posted them without the obvious intent to sell, it's a gray area. (You can find out more in Circular 66 at copyright.gov/circs/circ66.html.)
The most awkward part of the process comes when eCO transfers you to the Treasury Department site to pay with a credit card or set up an account. I thought I'd hit a glitch: It kept asking for a "deposit," which to me meant money. The folks at the beta tester helpline told me that "deposit" is copyright lingo: It was time to send in my creations.
The pictures needed to be in a ZIP folder. Two clicks on the desktop -- done. A few more clicks on the eCO website, and my masterpieces took cybernetic wing. At 11:01 a.m. the site started uploading about 70 megabytes, at a transfer rate of 40KB per second. "Transfer Complete" flashed on my screen at 11:32. It was embarrassingly easy.
The application is now being processed electronically, and I should be getting my registration certificate in the mail much sooner than the five months it takes when you send in old-fashioned CDs for processing.
Marybeth Peters, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, says she was forced to use off-the-shelf software for this system when the office began modernizing six years ago. "It's a useable model we're very proud of and we're happy to have it," she says. "But it's not a Cadillac. It's more like having a reliable Ford that you can improve and keeps chugging along."
Peters encourages photographers to try the system and offer feedback. But image recognition is still "years away," she says. "We're hoping a private consortium assembles a searchable database. It's not in our three-year strategic plan to have image-recognition technology become part of the
system. We have the official records of ownership and should be the place you end a search, not the place you start one."
But so far, efforts to start a private photographic collecting society (like the music industry's ASCAP or BMI) have come to naught. Victor Perlman of the ASMP believes that should be the Copyright Office's job. "It's a government agency -- it's supposed to serve the public, and if the public wants to find the owner of an orphan work, it's up to the Copyright Office to offer that capability," he says. "The only way to verify is to actually see that
image, and that's what they're not letting you do."
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