back in mid-february, i submitted my first batch of images to the copyright office using their eCO system and this tutorial: http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/articles/341. yesterday i received the paper confirmation (how 1980′s) that my work was successfully registered.
the process was (mostly) painless. as i recall, the eCO application wasn’t very safari friendly, but i was able to use firefox on the macbook to do everything. (it also doesn’t appear to be chrome-friendly on a windows machine.) the part that tripped me up a little was creating titles for the works in the first part of the process and then uploading the files later in the process. i had batched the images in to 4 groups and created 4 separate works in the first part of the application, figuring i would upload the 4 separate zip files at the end for easier organization. however, when the time came to upload the files, it only showed me the first title i entered during the application process. it did, however, let me upload all 4 files to that title, and if i look at the PDF version of the application, i can see all the titles, so i’m hoping it took all of the files. i submitted an e-mail to the copyright office to see if there was a way to actually view the images that were registered with the application, or at least see the file names of what i uploaded, so if i hear anything back from them, i’ll do a follow-follow-up post.
also, i uploaded the images as resized jpeg to save space, and they accepted them at 640 pixels on the long edge, so if you’re uploading a lot of files and are having a hard time with the file size upload limitation, that may be an option.
easy enough to do, only $35 and you can upload multiple images in a batch, totally worth it.
