Legal News

Writer?s Block: Trouble at Copyright Office Puts Dreams on Hold

By Ashby Jones

For years, we heard a neverending stream of complaints about the Patent and Trademark Office. It was inefficient, overworked and understaffed. As a result, too many patents were being issued, which was bollixing up everything from banking procedures to the production of semiconductors.

Now, those in the intellectual property world might have another agency to pan: the U.S. Copyright Office. According to this WaPo article, a serious logjam in the office has created a growing mountain of paper applications, more than the staff can process.

We loved the opening to the story:

The envelopes fill white plastic tubs, stacked on hundreds of shelves in the basement of the Library of Congress. They’re spreading to a ground-floor space that once housed the gift shop and are clogging offices on the fourth floor. And each day, the mail trucks bring about a thousand more.

Like the marching buckets of water in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the envelopes just keep coming, threatening to flood the operation.

Envelopes in white plastic tubs? Really? In any event, the problem has tripled the processing time for a copyright from six to 18 months.

According to the article, the slowdown largely stems from a new $52 million electronic process that is supposed to speed the way writers and others register work.

But the new process isn’t quite doing the job. the slowdown is frustrating hundreds of thousands of little-known people with big dreams. They paid $45 for the right to claim legal ownership of poems, fabric designs, plays, jingles, even computer manuals.

And our heart goes out to Marissa Ditkowsky, a Long Island teenager, who has been checking her mailbox for 15 months for the copyright registration for three songs she wrote, recorded and sent on a compact disc to the federal government.

“We lost a whole year,” said her mother, Alita, who wants to launch her guitar-strumming daughter on a music career. But Alita does not want her daughter to perform without a copyright, because she fears that Marissa’s songs are so good, someone else will steal them.

“This is just unacceptable,” the mother said. “Any company outside of a government agency would have been held accountable for this. They cashed my check, and I got nothing for it. There’s something very, very wrong here.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 19, 2009 (boomark / email).