Seeking Permission Begins with Identifying the Copyright Owner
Determining the copyright owner can be relatively simple for materials which carry a copyright registration symbol along with the name of a publishing company, or other form of copyright notice. If copyright holder is known, try starting with a visit to their official web site. Often publishers or authors may provide a statement on their site concerning the reproduction and/or adaptation of the copyrighted works that they own. The absence of a notice does not necessarily indicate that the item falls within the public domain. Below are some resources that may be used when seeking to identify copyright ownership.
Requesting Permission for Use
The Copyright Advisory Services office of Columbia University provides steps, suggestions, and model letters for seeking permission to use a copyrighted work.
The United States Copyright Office maintains a Copyright Public Records Portal which allows users to search copyright records held by the copyright office. Tutorial videos are also posted on the site, along with a link to their Circular 22 brochure entitled How To Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work.
WATCH is a database of copyright contacts for writers, artists, and prominent people in other creative fields. It is a joint project of the Harry Ransom Center and University of Reading Library in England. Founded in 1994 as a resource principally for copyright questions about literary manuscripts held in the U.S. and the U.K., it has now grown into one of the largest databases of copyright holders in the world.
The Catalog of Copyright Entries is a searchable index of copyright records from 1870 through 1977
Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database makes searchable the copyright renewal records received by the US Copyright Office between 1950 and 1992 for books published in the US between 1923 and 1963.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Sections of this guide are reused or adapted from Florida State University Libraries and Bentley University Library with permission.
