5 Simple Ways to Improve the Copyright Claims Board

The Copyright Claims Board (CCB) is now well over a year old. It has seen approximately 800 cases filed with it and has handed down final decisions in several cases.

Intended to be a more accessible, lower-cost way to litigate copyright disputes, the CCB has been something of a mixed bag when it comes to application. 

As pointed out by the Authors Alliance, the vast majority of cases submitted in the first year were dismissed, usually due to issues with the case itself or technical issues around its filing. 

All totaled, less than 9 percent of all cases filed in the first year made it to the “active phase” where the case is actually being litigated. 

But, despite these issues, the CCB experiment has been largely seen as a moderate success. It has helped at least some rightsholders either get judgements or settlements that are favorable to them, and has not been the scene of rampant abuse that many feared it would.

However, the CCB also offers an opportunity to iterate and improve the process. Though there’s not much doubt that the CCB is much more accessible, both in terms of complexity and cost, than the federal court system, there are still a lot of barriers to the average layperson.

This is highlighted by the fact that, accordion to the Authors Alliance study, while 90% of cases filed by an attorney in the CCB’s first year were certified as compliant, only 46% of self-represented cases were the same.

Closing that gap should be a major goal for the CCB, which aims to be a tool usable by laypeople. To that end, I have five relatively simple recommendations that could go a long way to helping a layperson file a successful claim with the CCB.

1: Example Documents

The CCB, as a part of the US Copyright Office, offers a great deal of information to filers. This includes a list of pro bono legal services that potential filers can reach out to for help. 

While the resources the CCB provides, in particular the handbook, are great, they’re also incredibly intimidating. They’re long, deal with complicated legal issues and, perhaps worst of all, don’t offer much practical guidance.

There’s no real substitute for having examples of good and bad work. They could, as they have done for their webinars, craft fake example cases to illustrate how to fill out the various forms and what information to provide. 

Otherwise, since all claims filed with the CCB are public record, they could simply highlight existing work that was successful or unsuccessful. Right now, if you want to find such examples, you have to hunt for them yourself in the CCB’s electronic case management system.

That, in turn, leads to the next problem.

2: Ability to Search By Case Status

Searching and navigating through the CCB’s document library is a breeze compared to using PACER, which is used to find documents in federal court cases. 

When searching for a document you can search for keywords, document type, the name of a party and within a particular date range. For example, if you want to look at final determinations by the CCB, all you have to do is search for that document type.

However, when searching for cases, your options are much more limited. You can search either for a keyword or by party name. You can also look at open and closed dockets, but there’s no indication as to why the dockets were closed.

This means that there’s no way to pull up a list of all cases that are in the active phase, or to find all the cases that were dismissed due to a non-compliant claim versus the respondent opting out.

This makes research into the CCB difficult, especially as the case number grows. This also hurts new filers, who may have trouble finding good examples to follow. The easier that this system is to navigate for the average internet user, the more people who will be able to make successful use of it. 

3: Better Statistics

This issue is connected to the one above, but it’s interesting that the CCB doesn’t provide easy-to-find statistics on what the board is doing right now.

How many cases have been filed with the CCB? How many of those cases were dismissed? How many of them are currently open? How many were settled? How many are in the active phase? How many were default judgements? 

You can get the answers to all these questions by going through the document library. However, it’s on you (or whoever wants the answer to those questions) to compile it.

It’s also worth noting that the answers are constantly changing as new cases come in, and older ones are closed out. Some clear statistics about what is going on at the board might help everyone understand how the project is going.

4: Better Filtering of Cases

According to the Authors Alliance, in the first year, some 35 cases were dismissed because they were filed against foreign respondents, and another 100 were dismissed because the filer hadn’t filed for a copyright registration.

This, to put it bluntly, is dumb.

Websites have long had the ability to prevent people from submitting forms with incomplete, inaccurate or missing information. Anyone who has tried to make a purchase online but forgot to include their ZIP code, failed to properly format a phone number or mistyped their address knows this well. 

Though the process for naming a respondent only configured for domestic addresses, there are no checks to ensure that the address is a valid one that is located within the United States. It’s still possible, with some work, to include a foreign address.

Likewise, though the part where you identify the infringed works does require either a registration number or a service request number, the system only checks the formatting, not whether the numbers are valid.

It’s easy to fill in fake data. Someone who isn’t familiar with copyright or this process may not understand that doing so will be fatal to their case as they scramble to clear up the errors that are preventing filing.

5: A Complete Glossary

The CCB uses a language that it pretty much unique to it. Rather than plaintiffs they have claimants, defendants are now respondents, a case is now a claim and so on.

The goal of this is to simplify the process and to avoid intimidating laypeople with tons of legal jargon. However, it creates its own bizarre kind of legal legalese. It’s a language that is neither straightforward nor immediately understandable to someone already familiar with legal terms.

The CCB handbook does provide a glossary, but it’s only five terms, and they’re all legal terms not unique to the CCB. Though it’s easy to write off the CCB terms as being self-explanatory, they can still intimidate and would do well to be defined in a single, clearly-marked space.

Likewise, for those who ARE familiar and comfortable with legal terms, it would be nice if the CCB could provide a form of translation guide. This would certainly help lawyers who are getting their start in the CCB.

Bottom Line

To reiterate, the CCB is far more accessible and usable than the federal court system. The filing process is much easier, the costs are much lower, and it is significantly easier to search for relevant documents.

However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement.

This is especially true since the CCB is intended to be used by laypeople with no legal expertise. Where the challenges of working within the federal court system may be only a small barrier to lawyers and law firms, even small hurdles can become major obstacles when dealing with people who have no experience.

In the end, these are just some ways to make the CCB more approachable and more effective, and they are all things that should be relatively easy to implement. 

Whether the board will or not remains to be seen, but here’s hoping that they continue to evolve and make progress on making the CCB more user-friendly for everyone.