A portion of the six months worth of delayed mail delivered in April 2002 to the Copyright Office.

In response to the mail delay, the Office adopted an interim regulation in December 2001 to address the effect of the general disruption of postal services on the Copyright Office’s receipt of deposits, applications, fees, and other materials. The regulation provided that persons who sent materials to the Office and believed the Office’s receipt of those materials had been delayed may submit evidence that the materials would have been received in the Office by a particular date but for the disruption or suspension. Based on the evidence submitted, the Office may assign a receipt date based on the date on which the materials would have been received had there been no disruption. Invoking section 709 of the copyright law (title 17 of the United States Code), the Register announced a determination that there had been a general disruption or suspension of postal services commencing on October 18, 2001. This determination remained in effect at the end of the fiscal year.

The Effective Date of Registration (EDR) for copyrighted works is normally determined by the date the application, deposit, and correct fee are received in the Copyright Office. As of February 2002, the Register made a procedural determination that, for delayed postal mail, the EDR would be calculated as a specific number of days after the postmark, generally when it would have been received had the mail not been delayed.

The Copyright Office’s website provided notification to the public of the disruption and suggested use of private carriers. Private carrier deliveries doubled as a result, becoming the primary method of mail receipt during the period of disruption.

Irradiation of mail at offsite facilities damaged some materials submitted for copyright registration and deposit.

Irradiation of delayed mail, causing high temperatures, subjected some photographs, videotapes, audiocassette tapes, and CDs to unreconstructable damage. The Office established a “triage” area to deal with damaged claims. Damaged filings from newly received mail continued through the end of the fiscal year.

The Licensing Division prepared notices about the postal disruption and sent copies to all cable television systems with outgoing Digital Audio Recording Technology (DART) and satellite carrier forms and with all Licensing Division correspondence. Copyright owners who qualify for royalties must file claims with the Copyright Office each year in order to receive a portion of the royalties collected the preceding calendar year under sections 111 and 119, and chapter 10, of the copyright law. The regulations require that a claimant either mail the claim or hand-deliver it to the Office of the General Counsel during the appropriate filing period. Because of the anthrax incidents, the Copyright Office announced in February and April 2002 that it would waive its mailing requirement and offered several additional means for delivering a cable, satellite, or DART claim to the Office, including an electronic submission of the claim or, in the case of the DART claims, a facsimile submission of the claim.

The Office responded to problems of deposit accounts that went into “no funds” status because of undelivered replenishment checks, checks that became uncollectible after a certain time period, and refunds resulting from double payment of fees. The Office also established a method to replenish deposit accounts by credit card.

In January 2002, the Congress responded to the terrorist and anthrax attacks by authorizing security-related supplemental funding to various agencies. The Copyright Office requested and received $187,386 in this special security supplemental to fund overtime expenses to process mail and to purchase protective equipment for mail handlers.

As the Copyright Office obtains some two-thirds of its budget from fees for services, the ongoing mail disruption had an impact not only on service to users, but also on the flow of receipts to the Office. On the basis of seriously reduced first quarter fee receipts, the Office estimated a potential $7.5 million shortfall in fee receipts for the fiscal year, about one-third of the total yearly receipts. In February, the Office requested $7.5 million in fy 2002 supplemental funding to cover a possible receipt shortfall. The request was approved as part of a government-wide supplemental appropriation that passed the Congress and was signed by the President in August 2002.