The United States Copyright Office maintains a web site that offers a current version of the Copyright Act in HTML and PDF formats. In contrast,
copyrightdata.com offers text of the law in HTML format only. Those who don’t require historic versions of the law should exit this page for the Copyright Office site.
The Copyright Office site offers an authoritative edition of the text, and provides visitors who have limited research needs with the option of retrieving just limited portions of the statutes.
About This Page
This page enables you to retrieve the full text of all versions of the Copyright Act of the United States from the 1909 Act to the present.
Select a range of dates:
This web site has not yet been updated to include Public Law 111-175, approved May 27, 2010. The text can be obtained from https://thomas.loc.gov and https://www.gpoaccess.gov
Coming Soon — if there is interest: There are plans that this
page will have checkboxes which will allow you to specify a group of sections of Title 17 (e.g., “§401-§412”). The “results” page
would then display just a narrow portion of Title 17 rather than the full text for the particular dates selected.
Pressing the button (above) would create the next page tailored for your combined choice of section(s) and dates.
At present, the button above submits your request for the full Title 17 as effective on the particular range of dates selected above.
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If you would like to see all of different ways in which the sections of Title 17 were worded from mid-1909 through mid-1947 and from mid-1947 until mid-1976, click below for a chart with each version
of each passage (whether changed or never changed during these multi-decade periods).
Click here for technical information about how the texts were compiled. (Readers interested in the history of section 119 are urged to read this.)
Also available on this web site:
The text of the laws passed between the major revisions of the Copyright Act.
Click here to select the specific laws for which you want to see the full text.
The vast majority of content retrieved through the controls on this page are verbatim copies of law enacted by the United States Government. No copyright claim is made by the web site editor (nor proprietor) on these nor any other works of the United States Government.
Formatting, editorial comments, and graphics on this portion (as with all portions) of the Copyright Registration and Renewal Information Website
© 2007 David P. Hayes