Page:Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices (1973).pdf/482

S-127

No. 36

REFLECTION OF THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE RECORDS
OF LIMITING STATEMENTS APPEARING
NEAR THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE

The Office of Education has adopted a regulation which contemplates that, for same works prepared under its contracts, the contractor will be permitted to claim copyright for a limited time only. The Office of Education will require the contractor in such cases to add to the copyright notice a statement that copyright is claimed only until a certain time, after which the work. will be in the public domain, according to the contractual agreement.

In this context, we have considered the question whether statements appearing near the copyright notice that limit the rights that the copyright claimant is asserting should be required to be reflected in the application and referred to in the Catalog of Copy­right Entries. Examples of such statements would be those that permit certain uses of the work, or, as in the cases under the Office of Education regulation, limit the duration of the copyright claim.The following policy has been formulated:

1.

Limiting statements appearing with the copyright notice, but not on the applications, are so numerous and so various in nature that it would not be practical as a general rule for the Office either to require that they be included in the application or to annotate the application.

2.

If such l1miting statements are not reflected on the application, the Office should not undertake to reflect them in its catalog entries.

3.

If a limitation is stated in the application, it should also be reflected 1n the catalog entry.

The only instances known to us of an official requirement that a copyright notice be accompanied by a limiting statement is the Office of Education regulation. We may not know in any particular case