loading . . . If Your Publisher Promised to Register Your Copyright, Check Your Registration Now A couple of years ago, while searching the US Copyright Office’s public copyright registration database on behalf of an author wanting to know if their copyright had been registered as required by their book contract, I decided on a whim to check my own copyright registrations.
I hadn’t felt any need to do so before. While smaller publishers generally leave it to authors to register their copyrights, for larger houses it’s standard for the publisher to register on authors’ behalf, at the publisher’s expense. Most of my contracts have been with imprints of big publishers. No reason to doubt they’d followed through, right?
But when I looked at my registration record, I realized that one book was missing: my YA historical, _Passion Blue_ , published in 2012 by Skyscape, an imprint of Amazon Publishing. Skyscape hadn’t registered copyright for this book, even though the contract stipulated that they should; and now, several years beyond the five-year post-publication window in which registration can be made, it was too late to do anything about it.
Confession: when something like this happens to me, it always sends me right to issues of self-worth. Obviously Skyscape didn’t consider me important enough to bother fulfilling its contractual obligation. Rationally, of course, I knew it was probably just an unfortunate oversight. An isolated incident, in other words, the sort of occasional falling-through-the-cracks thing that can happen to anyone.
Except…it doesn’t appear to be occasional at all.
In response to the impending settlement in the Bartz class action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic over its use of pirated books for AI training, authors have been checking their copyright registrations, since the class is limited to authors whose pirated books had their copyrights properly registered (in the USA, as in other countries, you own copyright from the moment you write down the words; but unlike other countries, the USA makes registration a pre-requisite to any kind of copyright-related court action). And increasingly, authors whose publishers were supposed to register for them are discovering how often their publishers…simply didn’t.
The above is just a sampling of the many posts on Bluesky about this issue. It appears that a problem any of us, checking our registration information, might have found infuriating but assumed was isolated or unusual, is extremely widespread.
In many cases, as with me, it’ll be too late for affected authors to do anything. But if you’ve discovered that your books are part of Bartz, and that copyrights to some of them weren’t registered as required by your contracts, and it is less than five years since your pub date, you can still register. The timelines involved–how long it will take for the class action settlement to be finalized, how long it will take for you to receive your registration certificate–may preclude you from being part of the class, even if you send in your registration application today. But in my opinion, registration is still worthwhile–for your general protection, of course, but also because there may be other class actions on AI training that you may be eligible to join.
Here’s how to find out if your books are included in the Bartz class action.
Here’s the US Copyright Office’s registration database, where you can look yourself up and see if your books are registered.
Here’s the US Copyright Office’s online registration portal. As far as I know, copyright isn’t considered to be officially registered until a certificate is received, and according to this circular, registration processing time averages 2.1 months (given that the Copyright Office is leaderless at the moment, it may be longer). _Note that the US Copyright Office is the ONLY place where you should register._ There are plenty of predatory and scam companies that purport to register for you, but they charge exorbitant fees and may or may not actually submit an application.
Here’s Writer Beware’s resource on copyright, where you can learn more about copyright and when and why to register (including many myths surrounding this subject).
Now that this problem has been exposed, will publishers, realizing the extent of their lapses, be deeply chagrinned and change their ways? Stop laughing! Bottom line: don’t count on your publisher to timely register your copyright, even if your contract requires it. Always check.
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