United States copyright registrations, renewals, and other catalog entries since 1978 are published online at the United States Copyright Office website.[1] Entries prior to 1978 are not published in the online catalog. Copyright registrations and renewals after 1890 were formerly published in semi-annual softcover catalogs called The Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE) or Copyright Catalog, or were published in microfiche.[2][3]
The Copyright Office published the Catalog of Copyright Entries in print format from 1891 through 1978. These volumes may often be available at federal depository libraries. From 1979 through 1982, the CCE was issued in microfiche format. The catalog was divided into parts according to the classes of works registered. Each CCE segment covered all registrations made during a particular period of time. Renewal registrations made from 1979 through 1982 are found in section 8 of the catalog. Renewals prior to that time were generally listed at the end of the volume containing the class of work to which they pertained. Effective with registrations made since 1982, the only way to see the CCE is by using the Internet to access the Copyright Office automated catalog. The automated catalog contains entries from 1978 forward. The catalog is accessible through copyright.gov.[4]
The Catalog of Copyright Entries, the Copyright Card Catalog, and the online files are indexes, not reproductions of original documents. To view or copy the original documents, one must visit the Copyright Office. Information such as registration numbers may be obtained from these files. Providing this information rather than paying a fee to have the Office search for it will reduce the cost of obtaining records and copies from the Copyright Office.[5]
Part 1. BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS, INCLUDING SERIALS AND CONTRIBUTION TO PERIODICALS
Part 2. PERIODICALS
Parts 3–4. DRAMAS AND WORKS PREPARED FOR ORAL DELIVERY
Part 5. MUSIC
Part 6. MAPS AND ATLASES
Parts 7–11A. WORKS OF ART, REPRODUCTIONS IN WORKS OF ART, SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS, PRINTS AND PICTORIAL ILLUSTRATIONS
Part 11B. COMMERCIAL PRINTS AND LABELS
Parts 12–13. MOTION PICTURES AND FILMSTRIPS
For selected categories, the Library of Congress published hardcover books of copyright registrations covering ten or more years. These include:
All of the cumulative Copyright Catalogs listed above are out of print, but the complete text of registrations and indexes in the four volumes of motion pictures from 1894 through 1959 have been reprinted in the Film Superlist series.
A number of entities have scanned all or some of the volumes of the CCE. The Stanford Library and the University of Pennsylvania library have each scanned a section of the records and put them into a database. At the University of Pennsylvania, they have scanned book and serials renewals, searchable by year at The Catalog of Copyright Entries.[6] Stanford has also placed renewal records into a Copyright Renewals[7] searchable database. More recently, Google has indexed many volumes of the CCE into a searchable index, available at Searching Google's Scans of the Catalog of Copyright Entries.[8] The Internet Archive has similarly scanned and indexed the volumes of the CCE, as well as many other US Copyright Office works, and makes the works both searchable and viewable as scans by searching for the "collection:copyrightrecords" at Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine.[9]
The Copyright Catalog has been criticized in that the public catalog includes personally identifiable information like home addresses and phone numbers of artists; removing or replacing that data may be hard.[10][11][12]
