Media & Entertainment Law

A small observation about the Copyright Office web site

Here's the story of a simple fix to the Copyright Office site that should probably be moved up on the priority list:

I was looking on the Copyright Office web site for the text of Section 506, regarding criminal copyright infringement, for the "making available" language, as discussed in my prior post.   Didn't find it.  Puzzled, I looked on the Cornell web site, and there it was.  Then I went back to the Copyright Office web site and noticed that their posted version of the Copyright Act is from 2003.

Above the links to the copyright statute, they have a box with a list of the half dozen amendments to the law since 2003.  So technically it's all there, but it hasn't been integrated into a single version of the code.  Not very helpful, and potentially misleading, to someone if they don't know precisely what they're looking for or that they need to reconcile the statute with all the amendments.  And a time-waster for those who do. 

The page with the box says:

"The documents below will be updated soon to reflect these changes."

That was 2004 -- it's now almost 2008, so "soon" appears to be a relative term.   I think we can do better -- especially given how copyright law is increasingly relevant to the general public in regard to their digital activities -- and the site (logically) is the top result on web search for "copyright act".   

Lucky for the Copyright Office they're not in Palo Alto.  Recently folks here started giving our city government hell from the moment it launched a flawed web site redesign!

Full post as published by Silicon Valley Media Law Blog on October 10, 2007 (boomark / email).