As I understand it, the Copyright Office does a cursory examination of registration applications to ensure something obviously non-copyrightable is rejected, but if there is any chance some part is copyrightable, it accepts the registration and then lets the owners and any infringers duke it out in court.
The Copyright Office has a major backlog as it is, so if it had to carefully ensure that every application was completely copyrightable and owned by the right people, it would need a lot more resources. I think moving all copyright cases to an adjudicative component of the Copyright Office is worth considering, but it would require more money and authority than the Office has right now.
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Copyright Office Overloaded
As I understand it, the Copyright Office does a cursory examination of registration applications to ensure something obviously non-copyrightable is rejected, but if there is any chance some part is copyrightable, it accepts the registration and then lets the owners and any infringers duke it out in court.
The Copyright Office has a major backlog as it is, so if it had to carefully ensure that every application was completely copyrightable and owned by the right people, it would need a lot more resources. I think moving all copyright cases to an adjudicative component of the Copyright Office is worth considering, but it would require more money and authority than the Office has right now.