Engine submitted comments this afternoon to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property following the panel’s Dec. 10th oversight hearing on modernization of the U.S. Copyright Office.
Startups and their users routinely create, share, and use content. Modernizing access to the Copyright Office’s records would allow the public—and entrepreneurs in particular—to more easily search through copyrighted works in order to identify any relevant copyright owners or license holders. With greater digital access, founders would be better equipped to make early-stage decisions that can help them avoid any liability later on.
“Modernizing copyright search capacity is particularly important because copyrighted content is both so ubiquitous and the nature of the protections are complex, often allowing for the possibility of multiple owners of a single work and several ownership claims to similar content, all of which is unknowable to startups and users under the current system,” we note in our comments.
You can read our full comments here.
