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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
I don't think so. The text seems to clearly state that the text must be copywritten elsewhere, or that the owner have "exclusive right of distribution." That seems to exclude an author who does not file for copyright, and who releases a book without specifying that only he can redistribute it.
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Authors have exclusive right of distribution unless they specifically waive that; it comes with copyright. And registration is not required to have a copywritten text.
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The way it's written leads me to believe that LoC expects any book distributor to want to protect their rights, so they will copyright,
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It may have been written before automatic copyright, but right now, all written works are copyrighted the moment ink hits page or pixels hit screen. They're "published" if they're distributed to more than about 5 people. The phrase "works protected by copyright" is now almost meaningless; it's pretty much everything other than official gov't documents in the US.
"Published" has never been coherently defined. Eighty years ago, "published" was relatively easy to decide; by fifty years ago there were problems (was a photocopied newsletter distributed to your sewing circle "published?"); now, it's almost meaningless. This particular law has an exemption for electronically-published, so there's no requirement to send in all of one's blog posts, but we still have a lot of paper publishing that never gets registered--newsletters, flyers, zines (OMG
fannish zines activist zines other zines), event guidebooks (conference schedules, librettos), information pamphlets & advertisements... plenty of published material never gets formally registered.
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But maybe someone should call the LoC and answer the question once and for all.
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Planning on doing that this week. (Maybe tomorrow, but I've bank-and-DMV things that have been waiting on the holiday weekend to get over.)