14th June 2005

Following on from the recent announcement of their online copyright registration facility, the UK Copyright Service have now launched a new facility, which allows copyright owners to lodge updates to their registrations at a reduced rate, via their web site.

This latest change means that as well as registering online, copyright owners can now submit revised versions of registered work over the Internet. This means that any new content is protected, and also establishes evidence of the evolution of a work.

For example:

• Writers can submit updated versions of their work following revisions or re-writes.
• Web designers can now update a registration as their web site content changes.
• Software designers can lodge new versions of their work.

A spokesman for the service said:

“Updates can be a difficult concept for registration systems, as they exist in a state of both needing to be individual items of evidence, whilst at the same time being directly linked to an existing registration.

Our back office systems had a major update last summer to enable us deal with this, and both our back office and client facing systems have also recently undergone further development to enable this to operate via our web site. As you would expect, the strength of evidence provided still lives up to our exacting standards.

As far as we know, we are the only organisation that offers this facility, so this really is another world first for the service.”

For those unfamiliar with the UK Copyright Service, the service provides a copyright witnessing facility for writers, musicians, artists, designers and other creative individuals and organisations throughout the world. The registration service allows copyright owners to deposit copies of their work as legal evidence, and helps prove ownership in case of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other disputes.