Page:Shrinking the Commons.djvu/31

 courts often referred to the author’s failure to comply with formalities as a “dedication” of the work to the public domain.

This strict “opt-in” regime ended on January 1, 1978, the effective date of the Copyright Act of 1976. The Act converted copyright to an “opt-out” regime: federal copyright protection attached automatically, by operation of law, without any further action by the author, the moment a work was “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” The 1976 Act preserved some existing formalities; copyrighted works were still required to bear a notice of copyright in a form specified by statute and to be deposited with the Library of Congress. In what Congress recognized as “a major change in the theoretical framework of American copyright law,” however, noncompliance with formalities was no longer necessarily fatal to copyright protection. The deposit requirement was expressly declared not to be a condition of copyrightability, and Congress provided a mechanism permitting authors to cure noncompliance with the notice requirement. The mechanism for curing defaults rested upon Congress’s perception of a need to protect authors from inadvertent or accidental losses of their rights, although authors who failed to avail themselves of the cure provision still risked having their work enter the public domain.

that, under Copyright Act of 1909, failure to comply with deposit requirement did not invalidate copyright).