Copyright, Content, And Platforms – This Week's Odds And Ends

The increase—about twenty-five percent over this year's budget—could help towards the Copyright Office's goal of making registration and other transactions simple, transparent, and technologically savvy, as laid out by the 5-year plan released by Maria Pallante, United States Register of Copyrights. It will also help pay for the overall administration and examination of copyrights done at the Copyright Office. In 2015, the Copyright Office registered 443,812 claims to copyright in original works of authorship. As noted by the Library of Congress, these include "Uptown Funk" (Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson) and "Alright" (Kendrick Lamar and Pharrell Williams) as well as "nearly half-[a] million novels, poems, films, software, video games, music, photographs and other works submitted."