Posts Tagged: "Third Edition of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices"

On January 14, the U.S. Copyright Office published in the Federal Register an update to the agency’s Third Edition of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices. The updates to the draft revision, which was first released in May 2019, include several changes based on public comments asking for clarification on several points of legal interpretation as well as major copyright decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court since the Third Edition’s last revision in 2017. Since issuing the public draft in May 2019, the Copyright Office received 24 public comments and the focus of most of these comments seems to have been aimed at language in the Third Edition’s 2019 draft giving greater discretion to agency examiners regarding registration refusals due to application deficiencies. Some commenters were concerned that this additional discretion would result in fewer opportunities for applicants to cure defects in their applications for copyright registration. Several changes in the recent Compendium update are intended to address these concerns, including the replacement of references to “deficiencies” with “variances,” which is defined as conflicting information pre