Peter Brantley and Carl Malamud have just asked the Copyright Office to make its retrospective database of registrations of copyright freely available to the public: Carl Malamud Tackles the Copyright Office. The claim is that the information is public domain (the Copyright Office apparently claims copyright on it) and that it is a valuable dataset that, if publicly available for research activities, could yield improvements to the search process itself as well as other information about the registration process.
It is rather remarkable that the massive numbers of registrations and renewals are only searchable back to 1978. Stanford made headlines when it provided access to the "determinator," its database of earlier records that are proving indispensable to determining which of the works registered during the period 1923 - 1963 are in the public domain because their owners did not renew their copyrights as was required during that time.
University of Texas is joining this effort to determine the copyright status of works that have been digitized by Google, but not just for the purpose of making those works that are found to be in the public domain more accessible, but also to further the research efforts of others along these same lines. We plan to document in detail the process we go through to make our determinations, the resources we find indispensable to our work, and when we are unable to make a determination, all the evidence that we were able to bring to bear on the question of copyright status so that others might be able to pick up where we left off. This is the kind of work that requires a "knowledge community" to further it. I know that the Copyright Office is a part of that knowledge community. Contributing its records to the research community is a special step that only it can take, a unique contribution I hope it will make.
