Despite the blossoming of copyright law and authorship theories over the past decades, there has thus far been very little in terms of empirical research to either affirm or refute any. Fortunately, the Copyright Office is home to the largest and oldest running registry of copyright claims...

The registration records at the U.S. Copyright Office provide a valuable lens on the use and performance of the copyright system, but have not yet been studied systematically. Using an original data set containing all 2.3 million registrations from 2008 to 2012, we provide a snapshot of current...