After reading the
Copyright Office’s proposed fees restructuring
proposal, one starts to wonder how they could be operating at a loss in the first place. Current fees ranging from $10 - $100 per filing are being raised to $20 - $220. That’s more than double what they are today, which still sounds steep to me.
Knowing many authors and artists personally, I continuously hear that they can’t afford to file a copyright claim at copyright.gov for everything that they write. This lead me to google what other countries are doing for copyright filing. I stumbled on the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works
wiki. The section below peaked my interest especially the bolded text:
“The United States refused initially to become a party to the Convention, since it would have required major changes in its copyright law (particularly with regard to moral rights,
removal of general requirement for registration of copyright works as well as elimination of mandatory copyright notice). On March 1, 1989, the US "Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988" came into force and the United States became a party to the Berne Convention.”
This got me thinking. Why does the US Copyright Office exist? Other countries don’t seem to have or need comparable offices in their governments. Do they? I understand why the office existed prior to the US "Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988", but why now? Documents are considered copyrighted when written - not filed.
The only issue apparently is proving who wrote what when. Here is where
Numly comes in!
Numly.com assigns Numly Numbers (Electronic Serial Numbers / ESNs) for all things digital. These unique identifiers provide digital rights management capabilities as well as third-party, non-repudiation measures for proof of copyright via real-time verifications. Numly Numbers are simple to generate and act as an electronic time stamp for copright purposes. They also allow you to track content viewership, monitor ratings, and can be used as permalinks!
Join the (R)evolution and (C)opyright your work on Numly!
87770-060522-49060-790 Rate content: 
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