World-Shaker

"Combined with the current online Copyright Catalog database, and some independent scans that fill in gaps in the Copyright Office set, records for every copyright registration and renewal still in force in the US can now be found online, free of charge. This is a great benefit for people wanting to make better use of copyrighted works and the public domain. With the information now online, we can quickly verify copyright and public domain status for lots of works, and also get useful leads on current owners of copyrights, in ways that were not possible when the only copies of the Catalog were in closed reserve at certain federal depository libraries. Various people in the Copyright Office have been hoping for a while to get approval and funding for this digitization, and I’m very thankful for their persistence in seeing the work through."

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Building on a full complement of copyright records « Everybody’s Libraries (via infoneer-pulse)

Reblogging because it’s so easy to understate just what a big deal this is for the world of education.