Quote:
Originally Posted by pltrgyst  [...]
Copyright applications are rejected only for incompleteness, meaning that the application, the fee, and the deposit of the work have not all been received. There is no examination or evaluation of the matter being registered, and there is no automatic reversion to the public domain.
[...]
Regards, Larry (not speaking for the gummint, but I do work at the US Patent and Trademark Office...) |
If you work for the USPTO then you need to take a refresher course. A while back I had a VA Copyright application rejected for a non-cue submission that was determined to be too simple to claim. The examiner (yes, there apparently IS an examiner of copyright applications - at least there was on this one) stated that my apparent desire must have been to copyright the
construction technique of the item, which is not something that can be protected by copyright. I didn't dispute the finding, and my $30 fee (at the time) was forfeited for their effort.
And, by default, if a piece of art is rejected for copyright registration
based on content then it is apparently unable to be protected by a copyright and therefore would seem to be
effectively "public domain".
Other than that, you
may have gotten everything right.
Thomas Wayne