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My POV
Brian A. Wilson
MOTHER OF ALL BOTTLENECKS: SEPT. 11 FALLOUT AT THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE
In case you didn't' know it, the US Copyright Office is in, pardon moi French, deep doo-doo.
The problem: those damn terrorists. Not sure if it's al Quaeda, Hezbollah or another crazy Cheesehead art student, but the goofball who has dumped anthrax into the US Postal System has thrown a monkey wrench in the copyright registration process as well.
The Copyright Office receives, in addition to your script registrations and mine, approximately 600,000 pieces per year. That's 50,000 a month, about 2,500 pieces each and every working day.
The problem is, since last October, most of those envelopes have been diverted away from the Library of Congress, which houses the Copyright Office. They're in some warehouse being irradiated, heat treated, scrutinized and generally zapped to decontaminate them. Limited deliveries have resumed as of March, but the hairball is, as you can imagine, of proportions that could only be created by the government.
If you haven't received your copyright registration certificates lately, that's why.
How bad is the problem? "It'll take an act of Congress to straighten out this mess," says Greg Victoroff, partner in LA law firm Rohde & Victoroff and a specialist in copyright matters.
Ouch.
Worse still, the sanitizing process is a harsh one, bad enough to fuse CDs to their jewel cases (bad for songwriters and filmmakers registering using CDs or DVDs). And it can make application forms or checks and money orders so brittle as to be unusable.
Nasty, ain't it?
What should you do? If you've already sent something in, there's probably not much to do but sit tight. Eventually, the gubment boys and girls will work their way through the mountainous backlog. If there's a problem with your materials, they'll be in touch. If not, according to the CW office, they'll give you a copyright date the same as if there had been no horrific delay.
If you're sending in materials now, my best advice is to use some company other than the US Postal Service. It's only the US mail that's been delayed and zapped. Shipments coming in from private carriers-FedX, UPS, Airborne and the like-have been unaffected. Their shipments get through and the materials processed in the standard few weeks.
So, again, if you have something to ship, don't use the post office!
By the way, Fed X has a swell new ground service. I sent in three scripts from LA for five bucks. That includes tracking, guaranteed delivery within five days and the whole shebang. That's cheaper than the post office anyway!
For the latest on the Copyright Office mail mess, visit http://www.copyright.gov/mail.html
Keep writing.
BW
LA
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