The Copyright Registry is a free online beta service, whose mission is to help creators claim, track and defend their copyright, while simultaneously helping users find the owners of creative works. Spurred by the recent legislative focus on orphan works, the new Web site claims: “If copyright infringement is the poison, The Copyright Registry is the antidote.”
The patent-pending technology behind the service indexes online creative works in a similar fashion to search-engine spiders. The service allows users to locate instances of online use, find owners of specific content, access online licensing services and the U.S. Copyright Office’s records, add a new type of copyright notice to images and issue take-down notices. For a fee, the service also generates reports that document all aspects of ownership and use.
The Copyright Registry was co-created by Randy Taylor, a longtime stock-industry executive and former Associated Press, Sygma and Black Star photographer. Officially, the registry is a service of Taylor’s StockPhotoFinder.com Inc., a New York technology company that also runs a stock-image search engine and offers other services and software to the creative industries. StockPhotoFinder is a charter member and key contributor to the Picture Licensing Universal System Coalition; the company’s team designed the numbering system behind the PLUS Media Matrix.
Artists using the service can take a proactive role in protecting their intellectual property from becoming orphaned on the Internet. On the publishing side, Taylor said the new service “offers a tremendous benefit to individuals and corporate rightsholders by allowing them to identify the content owner anywhere in the world” and fulfill the reasonable-search requirement of the pending orphan-works bill. Though it is presently stalled in U.S. Congress, the bill’s passing is considered inevitable by observers such as the American Society of Media Photographers, the Picture Archive Council of America and others.