Fellow Americans,

Happy Birthday America, but this is no time to relax. Make sure your guns are oiled and ready (and safely locked up) and ratchet up your (mock ) outrage, because the Evil Bureaucracy known as the US Copyright Office is going to increase fees on August 1, 2009! This violates the core principles of the US Constitution, as laid out in Article 1, Section 8. Those sacred words, written in 1776, say nothing about fees, and, since Copyright is the only right in the body of the Constitution, I for one believe this to be yet another attempt by the Obama Administration to raise taxes and expand government. So get out your poster paint, strap on your "Don't Tread on Me" sneakers and I'll see you at the Tea Party tomorrow at noon!

Hehe. I love a good rant, but if Glenn Beck weeps about this on TV tomorrow, remember you heard it here first. There are so many things wrong with that little paragraph, however. For one, the US Constitution was written in 1787. For another, fees aren't taxes. Oh, and the "fee adjustments" are only proposed, so while I suspect the Congress will just rubber stamp these changes, I suppose it is possible that someone could copy the first paragraph of this article waaaay out of context and send it around the Internets and get some idiot in the House to raise a stink about this. Perhaps most importantly:

For almost all of us, the Copyright filing fees will not increase.

As I note briefly starting on p. 190 of my book, the easiest way to file for Copyright is to fill out a form online electronically. That's how I do it and I assume that's how you do it, too. Then, since most of us modern content creators are working in digital multimedia formats, you upload your files to the Office yourself. Or you can burn a CD or DVD and mail it to them. "The fee for electronic filing... remains at $35."

For Harlan Ellison, who still writes his stories and books on old fashioned Olympia typewriters, the filing fee for submitting paper documents is going to go up. "To process these forms, the Office must digitize, manually enter and verify the information provided in the form, and process the accompanying check or money order even before the substantive review of the claim begins. This is a labor-intensive process resulting in increased processing costs. The Office proposes a higher fee of $65 to recover the greater cost."

So fees will increase if you fill out a paper form (using a typewriter or a pen) and are submitting vinyl albums or films on celluloid, but it looks like these increases reflect the cost of the service provided. What a concept: collect enough revenue to fund whatever services you want. Sounds reasonable to me.

References:
* Analysis and Proposed Copyright Fee Adjustments to Go into Effect on or about August 1, 2009, US Copyright Office
* h/t to contributor Jeff Whitley - thanks!