COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION AND RENEWAL RECORDS
Look up records by year
| Database | 1978-present | |||||||||
| Catalog of copyright entries | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | |
| 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | |
| 1950 | 1951 | 1952 | 1953 | 1954 | 1955 | 1956 | 1957 | 1958 | 1959 | |
| 1940 | 1941 | 1942 | 1943 | 1944 | 1945 | 1946 | 1947 | 1948 | 1949 | |
| 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939 | |
| 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 | 1926 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | |
| 1910 | 1911 | 1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | |
| Catalogue of title entries | 1900 | 1901 | 1902 | 1903 | 1904 | 1905 | 1906 | 1907 | 1908 | 1909 |
| 1891 | 1892 | 1893 | 1894 | 1895 | 1896 | 1897 | 1898 | 1899 | ||
| Dramatic compositions only | 1870-1890 | |||||||||
| Pre-1870 | 1789-1870 (not at Library of Congress) | |||||||||
- See whether a copyright has been registered or renewed. This can beuseful for determining whether a work published after 1928 is now inthe public domain. For instance, copyrightsfor works first published before 1964, and first published in the US,that were not registeredand renewed in a timely manner, have now expired into the public domain.(Some material that was first published abroad may be exempt from renewalrequirements.) To learn more about how to investigate the copyright renewalstatus 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.
Summaries and indexes
At present, there is no single searchable index for all online copyrightregistrations. Below we list sites that allow a large selection of recordsto be searched. We list them roughly in chronological order ofcoverage.- The Copyright Office now hasCatalog of Copyright Entries and Catalogue of Title Entries volumes posted at the Internet Archive. Coverage: As of April 2013, all volumes of the run from 1891-1978 are included. Our lookup pages by year have alternate sources in the small number of cases where a volume that has in-force copyrights is missing from the Copyright Office scans.
- Google Books'sSearch of Scans of the Catalog of Copyright Entries offers full-text search, and links to individual volumes, of 91 volumes of copyright registrations from 1922 to 1977. Coverage: Original and renewal registrations for books, pamphlets, and contributions to periodicals, 1922-1977 (except for 1952, when only book registrations and renewals are available).
- Stanford'sCopyright Renewal Database offers a quick search of book renewals.Coverage: Book renewals made between 1950 and 1992 (which renew books registered for copyright 1923-1963). 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, and on alarge file of renewal record transcriptions from Project Gutenberg
- Philip Harper's site also had a list of copyright renewal transcriptions, sorted by year of original registrations. It's also identified some books that do not have renewed copyrights. Coverage: Limited; mostly 1950s renewals for books originally registered 1923-1928. The lists of selected books that are probably in the US public domain goes out further; but copyright status of all such books should be verified.
- A list of first copyright renewals for periodicals is also available at this site. Coverage: Periodicals renewed from 1956 onward (for issues from 1929 onward); only the first active renewal of each periodical is guaranteed to be shown. Periodicals that first filed a renewal after 1977, or that did not renew copyrights, might not be included. We now have a guide for using this list and other data to determine the copyright status of serial content, and also a Deep Backfile knowledge base with serials for which we'd like to get copyright and free-issue information. (You can help!)
- Copyright renewals for artworks filed in 1951-1959,1960-1964,and 1965-1977have been transcribed by Project Gutenberg.
- The Copyright Office database is the definitive record of recent registrations. Coverage: All registrations (including renewals) from 1978 onward (except for a few 1978 registrations that did not make it into the database.)
Copyright records, by year
1891 - 1928
Our historic registration records page has pointers to original and renewal copyright records up to 1928.All copyrights registered in those yearshave expired in the US.1929 - 1949
See this page for original and renewal copyright records from 1929 to 1949.Original copyrights from these years may still be in force; renewal copyrights from these years (for original copyrightsfrom before 1929) have now expired in the US.1950 - 1977 (with renewals of copyrights from 1922 - 1950)
These years are not yet in an official database; however, various projectshave scanned original and renewal copyright registration page images.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, itmay still be copyrighted under the magazine's copyright even if thebook'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 for original and renewal registrations can be found here:
- 1950 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1951 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1952 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1953 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1954 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1955 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1956 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1957 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1958 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1959 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1960 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1961 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1962 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1963 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1964 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1965 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1966 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1967 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1968 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1969 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1970 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1971 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1972 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1973 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1974 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1975 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1976 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1977 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
- 1978 (all copyright registrations and renewals)
1978 - present (with renewals of copyrights from 1950 - 1977)
You can see copyright registration records from 1978 onward from theCopyright Office'sCopyright Records web site.This will include renewals for copyrights from 1951 onward (and some, butnot all, renewals for 1950 copyrights),as well as original registrations from 1978onward.For information on how to use the system, seethis file.Note that due to changes in copyright law, all works copyrighted in 1964or later automatically had their copyrights renewed, whether or nota renewal was filed, and works copyrighted after 1977 have a single long termwith no renewal.If you'd like to work with the database as a whole, and are willingto run some code to process it, public.resource.org made an unofficialcopy of the Copyright Office data available in the early 2000s.In 2008, Google made available an XML version of these records, slightly massaged.
Credits
This work is supported by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries,which hosts this site, supports its editor, and has scanned many ofthe drama and image renewals,by the UniversalLibrary Projectat Carnegie Mellon, which scanned page images for the "books" portionof therenewal 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,the Newark Public Library, andStanford University Libraries,which have supplied volumes to be scanned,by Google Books, which hasscanned many of the Catalog of Copyright Entries volumes,by Philip Harper and Project Gutenberg, who are providingtranscriptions of some of these records,and by volunteers and donorsfrom 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, writeonlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu to find out more how you can get involvedwith this project. Thanks to everyone helping out. (Thanks alsoto 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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