Selling Sheet Music 51. Inside the U.S. Copyright Office, with Associate Register Miriam Lord
Miriam Lord is the Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Public Information and Education for the United States Copyright Office. In that role, she is an expert copyright attorney and one of four primary legal advisors to the Register of Copyrights. She oversees the Office’s work to make the copyright system as accessible and understandable to as many people as possible.
Before joining the Office, Lord was the Director of the Global Intellectual Property Academy at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office within the Office of Policy and International Affairs, providing domestic and international intellectual property capacity-building and technical assistance for education policy and programs. She has also served as co-lead of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Equity Council’s Gender Committee. Previously, she was the Director of the Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts which provides under-resourced inventors, artists, start-ups, and creative nonprofits with legal assistance.
USCO Resources
- What Musicians Should Know about Copyright webpage
- Copyright and Artificial Intelligence landing page
- Level Up Your Copyright Public Records Search webinar
- Subscribe for Copyright Office email updates
- USCO Handout: Sampling, Interpolations, Beat Stores and More: An Introduction for Musicians Using Preexisting Music
- USCO Handout: How Songwriters, Composers, and Performers Get Paid
- USCO Handout: Copyright Registration at a Glance
- Standard Application for registering an individual sound recording or musical work.
- Group Registration of Unpublished Works for registering up to ten unpublished works all by the same author and the author is the claimant.
- Group Registration of Works on an Album of Music for registering up to twenty musical works or twenty sound recordings if the works are created by the same author or have at least one common author, and if the claimant for each work in the group is the same.
- USCO resources in Spanish: https://copyright.gov/espanol/
- Contact the USCO in English or Spanish for assistance or to request a speaker: Contact Form and Speaker Request Form
- Learn more about the Copyright Claims Board: Copyright Small Claims and the Copyright Claims Board and ccb.gov
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