Extending Intellectual Property Research in Copyright: A New Data Set from the U.S. Copyright Office

We introduce a newly available data set containing U.S. copyright records for 1978–2021. The data include nearly 19 million copyright registrations, as well as more than 12 million records of copyright renewals, terminations of granted rights, rights transfers, and other activities. The data include both raw and processed files, along with code books, documentation, and our data processing scripts; we provide tips and guidelines for using these data. We facilitate further research by linking copyright registration records with firm identifiers in Compustat as well as U.S. federal litigation data. We then use the data for three descriptive exercises. First, we characterize the relative usage of patenting and copyright protection across firms and industries. Second, we document the propensities for firms registering copyrights to be involved in copyright litigation. Third, we compare actual data on the incidence of copyright and patent registration with commonly used proxies: advertising and research and development expenditure. We hope that the availability of these data can facilitate progress on copyright research to parallel the broader intellectual property literature that has blossomed since patent data became widely available.