The Copyright Office received 607,492 claims to copyright in 2003; of these, it registered 534,122 claims. The office responded to more than 371,446 requests from the public for copyright information. The Library's collections and exchange programs received 962,119 copies of works from the Copyright Office, with a net worth of $33,709,004. This included 491,219 items received from publishers under the mandatory deposit provisions of the copyright law. The office also continued major initiatives to reengineer its core business processes and use information technology to increase the efficiency of operations and the timeliness of public services.
The Copyright Office continued to review all copyright legal cases that had been filed and in which the Register of Copyright or Librarian of Congress is a party, plus cases where the Register has the right to intervene. The Register did not choose to intervene in any cases in fiscal 2003.
During the year the Copyright Office administered six Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) proceedings that included five rate adjustment proceedings and one distribution proceeding. Two decisions of the Librarian of Congress, who sets rates and terms for statutory licenses, were the subject of a number of appeals pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The decisions involved two statutory licenses, one that allows for the performance of a sound recording publicly by means of digital audio transmission (webcasting), and the second the making of ephemeral recordings to facilitate these transmissions for the license period of Oct. 28, 1998, to Dec. 31, 2002. At year's end appeals were still pending.
