Deep Dive Into Why The Copyright Office Belongs In The Library Of Congress

I've got a deep dive story over at The Verge, taking an in-depth look at the fight over taking the Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress. I've written some about that here, but if you want to look at the full history of what's going on, and why this seemingly simple move could be a disaster for copyright on the internet, go take a read:

Supporters of this bill (and there are many) argue that the location of the Copyright Office within the Library of Congress is merely an "accident of history," brought about by the sixth Librarian of Congress, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who wished to turn the dilapidated and often ignored Library of Congress into a world-class institution with a comprehensive collection of all American created works. Spofford realized that by housing the copyright registration function within the Library, it would mean that everyone wishing to obtain a copyright would have to send a deposit copy, and the Library's collection would magically grow. The Copyright Act of 1870 made this arrangement the law.

But the synergies between the Library and the Copyright Office go way beyond being merely a way to trick people into building the Library. Managing copyrights - effectively a giant database of creative works - is very much a librarian-centric job. Librarians are custodians of information, helping to catalog and organize it while also helping people research and find what they're looking for. The Copyright Office today, like many old libraries, is filled with card catalogs.

It also details why this is so important:

Copyright itself has become a much bigger, and more important issue in the past few decades - in large part thanks to the rise of the internet, and the conflicts that arose because of it. In 1978 the copyright law in the US changed to a mandatory system, whereby any new and creative work was given automatic copyright - whether you wanted it or not - for your life plus another 70 years. Prior to that, the system had been opt-in only, where you had to register and follow certain formalities to obtain a copyright, that could, at a maximum last 56 years.

This massive expansion of what creative works were covered by copyright only slightly predated the rise of the greatest tool for the creation of new content ever known: the internet. And the internet exists because of computers, which are basically giant copying machines. Every time a song or photo or video is sent across the internet, a copy is made. A copyright system built for a different time, but massively expanded, ran headlong into a world of connected, copying computers, and a lot of lawyers have made a lot of money trying to adapt our copyright law to a culture-defining copying system.

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The internet is an astoundingly great tool for distributing content. But it does that by copying content, and often stripping out the need for gatekeeper middlemen. And that certainly upset a number of industries whose entire business model was about playing the role of the gatekeeper, and extracting massive sums of money while determine who was allowed through. The internet made at least some of that obsolete, but in a way that just didn't easily match up with copyright.

And the Copyright Office, historically, has not welcomed of the rise of the internet. Much of the leadership of the Copyright Office over the past few decades has come out of legacy industries - publishing, recorded music, movies - that had viewed copyright as a tool to serve a few big industries. The office has been accused of systemic bias from the revolving door of industry executives and lawyers going into the Office, or leaving the Office to go back to those same industries.

There's a lot more in the piece as well, including some discussion on the new Librarian of Congress effectively firing the Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante. I wrote the piece before also finding out about the massive failed IT project under Pallante, which provided an even greater rationale for the firing... and (importantly) much, much bigger reasons to have Congress reject this plan to effectively give more autonomy to the Copyright Office and to remove the oversight of the Librarian of Congress.