I Got The First GRTX Registration!

Well, at least I think I did. The US Copyright Office this year finalized rules for Group Registration for Short Online Literary Works (GRTX), and the application became available on October 29, 2020. I applied as soon as the application became available, and perhaps fittingly, I used the first ten entries in this blog (not counting a brief “hello world” post from a few months earlier). I received the registration certificate today – an impressive turnaround from the Copyright Office as they strive to modernize and reduce processing times.

I’ll note that the online copyright catalog hosted by the Copyright Office does show another GRTX, registration number TX0008890234, but it’s pretty obviously a test registration done by the Copyright Office itself. So I’m going to award myself the rebuttable presumption of this prestigious achievement. Edit (as of 11/24/20) – the Copyright Office confirmed that the prior GRTX registration was a test and is no longer in the public catalog, so I feel even more comfortable claiming all the glory.

The website for GRTX has excellent detail on the application process, including a video that really walks you through the process. In lieu of a detailed explainer, I’ll simply refer people there. Instead, I figured I’d share some brief thoughts (note that I haven’t checked every single one against the regulations):

• Firstly, the application is pretty easy to use, especially if you watch the video. You’ll want to have Excel on your system to prepare the provided spreadsheet template, otherwise the the process will be difficult. But it didn’t cause me too many problems.
• To do the registration you’ll need to generate PDFs of each work included in the group, follow the naming convention required, and put all the PDFs and the Excel file in one zip file and upload that. It’s a little too easy right now to only upload the excel sheet; a check that a zip file hadn’t been uploaded would be helpful.
• For people who are publishing their material on a third-party platform or otherwise creating content where a printout will show a lot of material they don’t own, the disclaimer process could get very complicated in terms of generating PDFs of the works. I’d suggest it might be simpler to either allow people to provide clean documents with just the short works being claimed, or to provide simple language for excluding anything not in the body of the claimed work. Either way, guidance here would be helpful.
• It would be nice if a permalink to each work is included in the excel sheet for recordkeeping purposes. It can be optional.

However, the biggest thing for me is probably the time limits. The other limits (maximum of 50 works, they all must be between 50 and 17,500 words) seem fine to me. But for infrequently updated blogs like this one – and many others – making it calendar year instead of 3 calendar months would make more sense and encourage more people in the aggregate to apply. The limitation of 50 works in the group would still limit people from abusing the process.

Also, note that the works have to be published within 3 calendar months – not 90 days from the first work. So it’s basically a system for quarterly registration filings. But since in many quarters I don’t publish more than one or two entries, I’m not sure I’ll bother for the rest of the blog.

These are quibbles, though, kudos to the Copyright Office for getting this system online, and I hope it gets used more. That way, when I brag about being first, it will mean something.