Copyright & Fair Use

The administrative manual of the Register of Copyrights concerning Title 17 of the United States Code and Chapter 37 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It provides instruction to agency staff regarding their statutory duties and provides expert guidance to copyright applicants, practitioners, scholars, the courts, and members of the general public regarding institutional practices and related principles of law. (introd.)

Early in the congressional hearings on copyright law revision it became apparent that problems raised by the use of the new technologies of photocopying and computers on the authorship, distribution, and use of copyrighted works were not dealt with by the then pending revision bill. Because of the complexity of these problems, CONTU was created to provide the President and Congress with recommendations concerning those changes in copyright law or procedure needed both to assure public access to copyrighted works used in conjunction with computer and machine duplication systems and to respect the rights of owners of copyrights in such works, while considering the concerns of the general public and the consumer. This report presents those recommendations, based on the three years of data collection, hearings, analysis, and deliberation called for in the Commission's enabling legislation.
   The National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established by Congress, and operated between 1975 and 1978 to determine how the Copyright Act of 1976 should address computers and copy machines. (Introd.)

The Catalog of Copyright Entries is the U.S. Copyright Office’s official publication of copyright registrations and renewals, organized into categories of works. ... There are two ways to search Google's scans of the volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries. You can search over all 91 volumes that have been scanned, or you can search over individual volumes covering registrations in or around a particular year. Many times, books were registered shortly after publication (within a year or two), so the book's year of publication could be a good starting point for searching individual volumes covering a year.

This report offers an examination and analysis of copyright exceptions applicable to libraries and archives from the copyright laws of all 191 countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Of the 191 countries, 161 of them have at least one provision in their copyright statutes that explicitly applies to libraries or archives, a fact that by itself demonstrates the strong relationship between the law and cultural institutions. (introd.)