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USCO United States (US) — national (copyright)
Layer national
Jurisdiction US (WIPO ST.3: US)
Issuing body United States Copyright Office (a service unit of the Library of Congress)
Rights administered copyright (registration, recordation, public catalog)
Working languages English
Connector status active
Last verified 2026-05-18
Manifest entry US/USCO/Registrations — patent_client_agents.copyright

Detail surveys:

Higher / sibling layers covering this office transitively:

  • None. The Berne Convention removed copyright registration as a precondition to copyright in member states; consequently there is no WIPO-system register that aggregates national copyright registers the way Madrid does for trademarks or Hague does for designs. The U.S. register is national-only.
  • WIPO Lex carries the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC) as a statute text layer, not register coverage.

Rating: 🟢 Green

Free anonymous Public Records System (PRS) REST API at api.publicrecords.copyright.gov. US is unusual among Berne jurisdictions in operating a copyright register at all — registration is constitutive of statutory damages + attorneys' fees (17 USC §§411, 412, 504, 505). Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

The U.S. Copyright Office, a service unit of the Library of Congress, administers the federal copyright register established under Article I, § 8, cl. 8 of the U.S. Constitution and implemented by 17 USC (Copyright Act of 1976, as amended). Its institutional role is set out at copyright.gov/about.

The U.S. is unusual among major jurisdictions in operating a federal copyright register at all. The Berne Convention (to which the U.S. acceded in 1988) bars member states from making registration a condition of copyright subsistence, so most countries do not maintain a register. The U.S. retained one because it is constitutive of remedies, not of the right:

  • 17 USC § 411(a) — registration (or refusal of registration) is a prerequisite to filing an infringement suit for a U.S. work.
  • 17 USC § 412 — statutory damages and attorneys' fees are unavailable for infringements that occur before registration (subject to a three-month grace window for published works).
  • 17 USC §§ 504, 505 — what those remedies look like.

This means for U.S. copyright litigation diligence, registration date is a load-bearing fact: it determines whether statutory damages and fee-shifting are on the table. Agents asked about U.S. copyright enforcement readiness will need to hit the register; this is exactly the slice the connector covers.

§2 What's unique here

  • The only federal copyright register in the U.S. legal system — no state register, no private substitute carries this data with primary-source authority.
  • Type-of-record split: registration vs. recordation — registrations cover the work; recordations cover post-registration documents (assignments, security interests, terminations) under 17 USC § 205. The PRS facets expose both in one query.
  • System-of-origin split: voyager vs. card_catalog — post-1978 registrations live in the Voyager catalog; pre-1978 registrations are surfaced from the digitized Card Catalog with image links to LOC's tile server. Pre-1978 records are still partial; many remain paper-only in the Card Catalog reading room.
  • Registration classes — TX (literary), VA (visual art), PA (performing arts), SR (sound recording), SE (serial), MA (mask work), VR (vessel hull) etc. Cataloged as facets on every search response.
  • Claimant chains — original claimant + transferee chain via recordations is the structured paper trail for U.S. copyright ownership disputes.

§3 Programmatic surfaces

Public Records System (PRS) — search API

Field Value
Endpoint https://api.publicrecords.copyright.gov/search_service_external/simple_search_dsl
Auth none
Format JSON
Protocol HTTP/2 required — HTTP/1.1 is rejected with 500 at the server
Rate limit undocumented; no published throttle
ToS posture Public records under 17 USC § 705; the Public Records System UI ToS carries standard government-records language
Rating (zero-infra proxy) 🟢 Green — operational
Primary source Public Records System portal

Backs the consumer-facing publicrecords.copyright.gov UI. The endpoint is undocumented at the API level but stable — our connector has been tracking it since the PRS launch. Query parameters: query, field_type (keyword | title | name), page_number, records_per_page, sort_order. Faceted results include type-of-record, type-of-work, registration class, status, system-of-origin, and recordation-item-type histograms.

Bulk data — copyright.gov/data

Field Value
Endpoint copyright.gov/data
Auth none
Format various — typically pipe-delimited / fixed-width per dataset README
Rating 🟡 Yellow — exists, but bulk-shape; not a query API
Primary source copyright.gov/data

Periodic register and recordation dumps suitable for offline indexing. The shape is bulk, not query, so it does not fit the zero-infra-proxy posture — covered as a downloadable artifact, not exposed as a live tool.

eCO — electronic registration filing portal

Field Value
Endpoint eco.copyright.gov
Auth account-based (filer-only)
Rating 🔴 Red — out of scope; this is the filing portal, not a read API
Primary source eCO help

For completeness only. Filing infrastructure, not a register read surface.

§4 Fees

Policy: link only. USCO charges fees in USD across three principal categories: registration (electronic and paper, per Circular 4), recordation of transfers and other documents (per Circular 12), and search & certification services for register lookups performed by the office on demand.

The PRS API itself is free to query; the paid fee categories above relate to filing acts (registering, recording documents) and to staff-mediated search/certification services, not to programmatic register access.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

patent_client_agents.copyright — async client over the PRS simple_search_dsl endpoint. Surface is intentionally narrow:

  • search(query, field=…) — generic search; field ∈ {keyword, title, name}
  • search_by_title(title) / search_by_name(name) — convenience wrappers
  • get_record(public_records_id) — fetch a specific record by its PRS ID (re-searches under the hood; the upstream API has no dedicated detail endpoint)

Response shape exposes the full record envelope: registration number(s), class, status, claimants (raw + structured), publisher, work type, system-of-origin, key dates, plus the facet histogram for query refinement. The scalar-vs-list coercer in the model layer handles SR-prefix sound-recording rows that return a single-element value where the schema expects a list.

Manifest row: US/USCO/Registrations, access: rest_api, auth: none, category: registered_ip, transport: mcp_proxy.

What we could add

  • Recordation-side detail expansion — recordations carry document text and reel/frame analogs that aren't fully decoded into the model today. The PRS search response carries the keys; a dedicated get_recordation shape could surface document images and the recorded-party chain.
  • Card Catalog image fetch — link_to_image_url is populated for pre-1978 hits. A thin image-fetch surface (LOC tile server) would let agents render the digitized card without a separate scraping step.
  • Bulk data catalog connector — Shape E catalog over copyright.gov/data (analogous to USPTO Bulk Data). Low priority — the live API covers most agent use cases.

Next steps

  1. Watch the ECS (Enterprise Copyright System) modernization program — USCO has been migrating public-facing systems for several years; PRS is the current public-search system but the broader ECS rollout could change the API contract. Re-verify endpoint behavior on each major ECS release note.
  2. Reconsider the bulk-data Shape E connector if user demand emerges for full-corpus copyright analysis.

§6 Known unknowns

  • ECS migration status as of 2026-05-18 — the Copyright Modernization hub lists in-progress workstreams; whether ECS will change the api.publicrecords.copyright.gov contract or merely the front-end is not yet specified in any Federal Register notice we've found. Next action: subscribe to USCO NewsNet and re-verify connector against the next ECS release.
  • PRS rate-limit ceiling — no published throttle; aggressive volume could trip a rate-limit response we haven't seen. Next action: instrument retry metrics and surface limit responses if encountered.
  • Pre-1978 backfile completeness — Card Catalog digitization is ongoing; primary-source coverage map is not published. Next action: file a USCO records inquiry if a specific pre-1978 gap blocks a deal.

§7 References

Primary sources only.

APIs / portals:

Statutory + regulatory:

Office guidance:

Fee + adjustment:

Connector:

Last updated 2026-05-18.