Copyright Office Violating Copyright Law by George Ziemann -- Sept. 19, 2007 I originally spotted this at BoingBoing a couple of days ago. No one seems to have picked up on it, which is not too suprising considering all of the other illegal things our government is currently up to. Let's start with the background. From the Copyright Office's copy of the U.S. copyright law, Title 17, Chapter 1, section 105: § 105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise. The Cornell University Law School also has a 1976 clarification (House Report No. 94-1476): The effect of section 105 is intended to place all works of the United States Government, published or unpublished, in the public domain. This means that the individual Government official or employee who wrote the work could not secure copyright in it or restrain its dissemination by the Government or anyone else, but it also means that, as far as the copyright law is concerned, the Government could not restrain the employee or official from disseminating the work if he or she chooses to do so. The use of the term "work of the United States Government" does not mean that a work falling within the definition of that term is the property of the U.S. Government. [Emphasis added] If someone, like a library of college, wants to acquire a copy of the Copyright Office's database of copyright registrations, they will discover the following: "The Cataloging and Distribution Service of the Library of Congress sells a current subscription for $31,500 and makes the retrospective database available for $55,125 for a total cost of entry of $86,625. The Library of Congress Terms of Use assert copyright on this data." You can write a letter to Marybeth Peters, the Copyright Registrar, but don't expect it to do any good. Peters is, in my opinion, a complete fucking idiot that lives in the pocket of the RIAA. She doesn't own a computer, doesn't know the difference between a dongle and a floppy disk, and thinks the DMCA is working just fine. She should have been fired years ago. Regardless of Peters' future employment, this bullshit has to stop. Works of the U.S. Government are automaticially public domain material. The database of copyright registrations is obviously a work of the government. The Copyright Office is ignoring the copyright laws, making them no better than the millions of people that are theoretically (but unproven in court) breaking the law by using peer-to-peer services. However, unlike the p2p users, the Copyright Office is making an obscene profit. The mission of the Copyright Office is to promote creativity by administering and sustaining an effective national copyright system. So when are they going to start doing that? If they have no respect for the copyright laws, why in the world would anyone else? And who do you call to report the crime?

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