All right, I think we're about ready to get started. Welcome to everyone to the copyright public modernization committee and our first public meeting. I'm David Brunton and I'll be your moderator. I mentioned this a moment ago but the CIO and the register will be providing opening remarks. I want to recall to everyone that this session is being recorded. It will be posted on our website later, and this will be the primary record of our activity today. Library of Congress chief information officer Bud Barton will be speaking first and he'll hand the mic directly to the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. copyright office, my boss, Cheryl. Bud, with that, please take it away. >> Thank you, David. Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to welcome all of you to this first meeting of the copyright public modernization committee. Ensuring that the copyright office has a state-of-the-art I.T. system is a top priority for the library, and I'm hopeful that this committee will help ensure close engagement with the many copyright community stakeholders who share an interest in our success. Building complex I.T. systems isn't new for the library. We've been developing complex systems for over two decades. Constantly striving to adapt the latest technologies and best practices, we will be using that expertise as we develop what's come to be known as the enterprise copyright system. Ultimately, however, we know that the test of an I.T. system isn't how well it's coded or how pretty it looks, it's how well the system meets the needs of its users. That's why we've built this effort around an extensive user experience designed program, testing and gathering feedback on every step of the copyright process to ensure we know what users need in a copyright system and what we develop meets those needs in an intuitive way. To me, this committee is also another part of our user design effort. You were selected to join us because of your expertise, your experience, your ability to represent the diverse spectrum of copyright stakeholders, and it's my hope that you will share your informed perspectives on how the new enterprise copyright system will be used and what we should be thinking about from an I.T. perspective as we continue to mature it in the years ahead. Today's meeting will focus on technology and how we can harness it most effectively for the copyright office and for you. This venue is not appropriate to address questions regarding copyright policy or copyright law. Before I hand this over to the register, I'd like to add a personal note. As some of you already know, I will be retiring as the CIO of the library in September. Rest assured that I'm leaving this effort in good hands. My deputy, Judith, has been named the next CIO. I have great confidence in Judith and every member of this team. With your support and input, we will deliver a modern suite of applications worthy of the stakeholders of the U.S. copyright system. I'll now pass it over for a few words. >> Thanks, Bud. Let me add my welcome to everyone joining this event. The new copyright public modernization committee, the staff from the Library of Congress's office of the chief information officer, my colleagues at the U.S. copyright office, and of course members of the public, today gives us an opportunity both to provide information and to benefit from the insights of the CPCM members. They have all been selected from a truly impressive group of applicants by the librarian of congress and we are delighted they're willing to contribute their time and expertise. Public input has been and continues to be a key part of copyright modernization. As our various projects for the technology used in our services have moved forward, we've heard from the public in a variety of ways. . One of the most valuable has been direct feedback from those engaging with our newly released pilots which has been instrumental in our ongoing design and engineering decisions. This includes the copyright public records system launched at the end of 2020 and currently available on our website at copyright.gov. In the area of recordation, several waves of participants have provided extensive input on the new recordation pilot. As to registration, a group of early users has helped test applicable prototype of our standard application, and as we continue work on improvements in all of these areas, we've requested public comments through notices of inquiry and rulemakings. The copyright office also hosts bimonthly public webinars where we share updates on all of our modernization projects, and last July we held a public forum with OCIO on this topic. I encourage everyone to visit the copyright office website which has a wealth of materials such as documents and fact sheets and recordings of those webinars. Please do continue providing feedback through all available channels to help us develop the most successful products possible. Finally, I'd like to put these initiatives into a broader context. All of this work on modernization contributes to two of the copyright office's strategic goals. First, we intend to keep pace with changing technology not just today but into the future, continuously refining our services without waiting for them to become out of date. Second, we want to open the copyright system up further to all members of the public including currently underserved communities which includes making office services as accessible and as user friendly as possible. The way we design our technology can play a major role in this effort as you'll see, for example, from the registration clickable prototype which requires far less expertise to use than our current applications. In today's meetings, we'll begin with presentations from project leaders to provide an overview of our recent progress and our current approach to modernization. After that, members of the CPMC will provide brief opening remarks followed by a moderated panel discussion and we'll take questions and give answers from the public at the end. I'm very much looking forward to hearing the comments and all of the discussion, so thank you and I'll hand the virtual mic back to our moderator, David Brunton. >> Thank you. Hopefully all of the logistics are reasonably clear to everyone at this point. A final logistical point that I would like to make is that as the moderator, I reserve the right to call an audible during this three-hour-long session either for the purpose of giving committee members and staff a breather or for giving us additional time as specific topics seem to warrant it. Members, please feel free to drop any questions or comments into the chat. Our next two speakers are Natalie, the head of user experience and design at the Library of Congress, and Sarah, our product manager in the U.S. copyright office. You'll hear a little from Sarah about how the business prioritizes our needs. The product manager is the person from the business with day to day responsibilities for managing the future pipeline. We'll hear more from Natalie about OCIO and the copyright office and how they work together to keep decisions centered on our users. One additional point I wanted to make is that it's absolutely fine for members of the public, participants in the webinar, to put questions into the Q&A, but we're not going to be taking questions throughout the session. We'll be fielding those toward the end of the agenda. With that, Sarah, will you take us away. >> Thank you, David. Good afternoon, everyone. Today I'm going to share a bit about our vision and goals for the ECS, the enterprise copyright system, and in a few minutes, I'll dive a little deeper into our ECS development journey thus far. Next slide, please. In the envisioned ECS, all aspects of copyright services and systems are integrated. All users benefit from our responsive, flexible design. Our centrally implemented capabilities are shared across all copyright services that are supported by the ECS, our consistent optimized interface, optimized business processes that are built into the individual components of the ECS as well. We look to our OCIO partners to provide us with the improved technology to provide you with these modernized capabilities. Next slide, please. To reiterate, our end goal is an enterprise system that covers all aspects of copyright services including the registration, recordation, public record, and licensing areas, providing for a user friendly, centralized location to file applications and transfers of ownership. Next slide, please. To meet this ambitious goal requires the implementation of several guiding principles, a strong, effective partnership, and constant collaboration between the United States copyright office and the office of the chief information officer, the OCIO. A focus on delivering the quality that exceeds user expectations through a concentration on a user-centered design which ties together people, technology and business processes, and the implementation of and adherence to industry best practices for software engineering and systems design as implemented through the library's project management life cycle and systems development life cycle process. A focus on agility and the collection of metrics help us enable decision-making. Rigorous testing that is central to our user design strategy which also enables us to make quick adjustments based on your feedback. In sum, our user-centered design approach, our focus on agility, feedback and applying lessons learned all support iterative development and allows us to deploy functionality over time and build towards a fully functional ECS. With that, I will pass the mic virtually to Natalie Smith. >> Thanks, Sarah. Next slide, please. Copyright modernization has continued to mature in scale and has fully embraced user centered agile cloud first practices. These flexible, scaleable and resilient approaches allow all that work on copyright modernization to be more efficient and continuously improve the service offerings. Next slide, please. Our multiple teams use online tools to plan, manage, groom and track user stories, issues, sprints and releases, all common practices in modern design and development. While we have been operating virtually for a while, we have continued to collaborate and work just as effectively if not more. At the heart of our collaboration, futures are planned and discussed by team members that include business owners, project managers, subject matter experts, user experience designers, developers, Devops engineers, accessibility specialists and experts. They discuss ideas and items that may be holding up work to solve problems. Solving problems and planning work in the daily scrum are managed in the form of user stories. User stories are very brief descriptions of work to be completed in a defined period of time or a sprint. Multiple user stories are in a sprint and multiple sprints are in a release. A product road map is used to plan a communicate the features to be designed and developed in this timeline. Building up plans and releases from user stories and sprints allow multiple teams to quickly distribute work to the many individuals in their large teams and quickly shift direction to solve problems, change and grow. Next slide. Since copyright modernization has several teams working on several service at the same time, we utilize the scaled agile framework to manage, communicate and coordinate the large amount of work that is under way. This safe framework breaks down copyright modernization into larger efforts of work called epics and those are divided into features. We have also conducted multiple program increment planning events which is a cadence-based event that aligns all the teams on the art to a shared road map, mission and vision. Next slide, please. The copyright system is a -- the enterprise copyright system is a complex ecosystem with multi- multiple services that uses a technical approach that is cloud native. We are developing for the cloud at the start versus moving code into cloud later, and we use shared micro services. The use of micro services allow us to scale and be more efficient. Micro services are specific business capabilities that can be employed, integrated, tested and maintained separately but can be used together as a collection of services. Once developed, these services can be used across all of the copyright services. These shared services create consistency, allow for efficiency, and make maintenance easier. An example of a shared micro service is our notification service which can be seen in registration, recordation and other services that have similar notification needs. A notification could appear when there's an update on an account, a claim, a correspondence and more. This notification micro service can be designed and developed as a single shared micro service and then used across the multiple copyright services so there's an efficiency and a design development deployment ongoing maia Increasing our ability to scale and be more efficient is our design system based on the U.S. web design system. Our multiple scrum teams share the same design system for all copyright modernization which allows them to build features from shared components that have been already designed, developed and tested with the same specifications that meet our accessibility standards. Next slide, please. As I mentioned before, the enterprise copyright system is a large ecosystem with multiple services and many scrum teams. We are using a singular design system and shared micro services to build consistency between the services where best applied. We are aiming for this consistency in the fields and buttons that you'll see in the applications that will operate in the same ways and with larger features such as log-in and other account features. This is helpful in two ways. It makes all of these services easier to learn and understand, and it makes this large enterprise copyright system easier to maintain. This consistency also builds trust, familiarity and ease of use since users of both the general public and the copyright staff will know what to expect when they use the system. Next slide, please. User centered design practices are at the heart of copyright modernization with user research and user experience design. Our teams interact with actual users through all phases from initial concepts to testing and other methods such as metrics. We show users frames and prototypes to get questions. We observe them using parts of the service or an entire application to understand if a feature is working well and working as expected. Our product teams design services for users first rather than letting the system dictate how the user must use a service. We get feedback from real users with user research and bring that knowledge back to the scrum teams throughout the entire life cycle of our work. This allows us to solve problems from a user centric point of view and the voice of those that depend on the U.S. copyright service can be clearly seen in all the services and copyright modernization. That's the end of my section, and back to Sarah who will give a brief interview -- sorry, a brief overview of the services. >> Thank you so much, Natalie. Now I'd like to share a bit about our development journey thus far and I will begin with registration development. If we could have the next slide, great. We initiated full registration development activities in April of last year. Registration development is a multi-year endeavor. At this stage of development we are focused on both the external, that is the content creator side, and the internal, those are the examiner functions. A recent project milestone was the completion of version two of a clickable prototype. This prototype is being used to support moderated user testing. Notice I said version two, which means that there was a version one. Version two incorporated feedback from a round of moderated user testing that was completed earlier this calendar year on version one. This is one example of our iterative approach to ESC development in action. Next slide. Some of you may be participants in the recordation public pilot released in April of last year. Since April of 2020, we have recorded more than 2600 documents. We currently have over 90 individuals participating in the pilot and we hold regular webinars to address user questions and provide feedback to the development team on the pilot usage. If you're interested in participating in the recordation pilot, we'd love to talk to you. Please reach out to recordation-pilot@copyright.gov. Next slide, please. We continue to iterate on the pilot to implement additional features and are in the early stages of development for notices of termination, work flow functionality. Next slide, please. Licensing development was initiated earlier this calendar year. The focus is on work flows needed by staff to examine and verify statement of account submissions, and we are currently working on features needed to support the manual uploading of Microsoft Excel formatted forms, gathering requirements and identifying processes. Next slide, please. Finally, the public record system, development began in September of 2019 and is multi-year. In December of last year, we released a live public pilot. Release two is anticipated to be released late this summer and it will include additional features including recent records and recent searches functionality, the ability to download records, and some usability improvements. I believe this to be the most important systems development endeavor at the most important time for the copyright office. As we progress down our development path, my conviction that this is true only becomes stronger, and my excitement and anticipation only increases with each incremental release and significant development milestone. With that I will turn this back to David. Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Natalie and Sarah. What an exciting time to be at the copyright office with these changes under way. With the content set by the CIO and the register and with those additional details provided by our product manager and the library's user experience and design, we're going to transition a little bit and talk to our panelists for their initial input on this, our inaugural meeting, of the copyright modernization committee. We are right now running sort of exactly on time and I have a mute button that I'm not going to be afraid to use today in order to keep inside of our three-hour time window for this event. We really need these initial remarks to be limited to no more than five minutes and focused on the agency's I.T. modernization. I'm going to be taking notes of specific events raised during people's opening remarks to spur our conversation and the subsequent panel discussion, and panelists will be called on by last name. I will only be stating your name and your organizational affiliation, no extensive biography, but it is my hope that in this inaugural session as we're getting to know each other a little more that we'll hear a little more about you as you give opening remarks. Please feel free to include your own reasons for interest in the committee. Lastly, if there are any technical difficulties with the panelists' cameras or microphones or internet connection, we'll move on to the subsequent name and push that person to the end of the list and revisit them. With that I'd like to introduce Todd Carpenter of the National Information Standards Organization. Feel free to turn on your mic and camera. >> Hello, everyone. My name is Todd Carpenter. I'm the executive director of the National Information Standards Organization. We are a nonprofit organization comprised of approximately 300 institutions, companies, associations, libraries that serve the entire information media and library communities. We were founded in 1939 and our mission is to build knowledge, foster discussions, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration amongst scholarly, scientific and professional communities. We are an accredited standards developer. We develop standards for publishers, libraries and software providers. Some of the things that we develop, standards for information is not something that rolls off the tongue for most people. Some of the things we are responsible for creating and managing that you probably have run into in your day to day lives, bar codes on the back of books, ISBN numbers. For those of you who remember card catalogs in libraries, those cards were a representation of NISO standards to mark records. We develop a variety of identifier metadata circulation standards for library systems, et cetera. We spent the last two decades as an organization moving us from a physical based world to a digital based world which involves a transition of a lot of the standards for creating content, for distributing content and managing content. Internationally we also work outside of the United States within ISO, the international standards body, in the areas of information and documentation, as well as document file formats. Within that community I also serve as the committee manager for the international subcommittee on identification and description. This is where all of the identifier standards and some of the metadata standards related to cultural content exist. So ISBN for books, ISSN for serials, ISRC, the international standard recording coat for musical works, I SAN for audio visual works and DOI for digital content. I spent about 15 years in a variety of marketing and business related aspects of primarily online journal publishers. Personally I am a content creator. I'm the author of two books, one forthcoming, fingers crossed, as every author is like, it's almost done, it's almost done. I have written many dozens of articles focused on technology and libraries. I'm also an avid photographer. I was an inaugural member of the American library association policy corp and served on the Baltimore county public library. I'm looking forward to learning from all of you, particularly how we manage -- one minute, excellent. I'm just about done. Particularly how the copyright office manages copyright information and how that information is accessible to users, both the public, as well as corporate users of this information, and how those systems interact, how data is exchanged with the copyright office and extracted from the copyright office and how standards can help facilitate that. With that, thank you, David, for keeping me on schedule, and looking forward to working with the rest of the committee. Thanks. >> Thank you so much, Todd. In case any of the other panelists didn't see it, as the one-minute mark passed I held up a sticky note on the screen. Even if you can't read it, it says one minute on it. The next person I'd like to introduce is [ indiscernible ] of Amazon.com. If you could turn on your microphone and camera, I'll start your timer. >> Thank you, David. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this forum. I am a technical product manager at Amazon working on enabling proactive intellectual property management and protection systems for rights owners. I have the privilege of leading the product and engineering team that I was on that prevent counterfeits and infringement from harming our customers, brands and selling partners. Amazon provides tremendous selection, I think as we all know, convenience and value to consumers as well as unprecedented opportunities for millions of small and medium sized businesses. Unfortunately this also presents an attractive target for criminals and bad actors to attempt to attack our stores and services. If a customer doesn't trust what they purchase throughout Amazon stores, we know they can and will shop elsewhere. As a result, Amazon investments tremendous resources in prev The primary challenges that I focus on include scaling of broad spectrum IP detection and enforcement technologies that utilize a combination of machine learning and data from IP registries across every country that Amazon sells. Ensuring that we can deliver a trusted experience to customers and stakeholders includes working closely to create a seamless process, verifying authenticity and creating a robust data infrastructure that will allow us to make precise decisions on billions ofludi A major bottle neck is the copyright assets, as well as a vast network of licensing relationships tied to that asset. This initiative to modernize the copyright office in an effort to provide customers to legal goods and content. This will allow us to scale protections and ensure the accurate usage of copyright assets. The initiative also presents a strong value prop for content creators to enhance their ability to protect themselves. I hope to be able to contribute my experience with the various use cases I see daily with copyright data to ensure that the outcome of the modernization initiative can benefit copyright holders for visual, textual and audio content. We know this will require continued investments, innovation and collaboration. Amazon will continue to invest in and improve the tools needed to protect our customers and partners. We welcome the opportunity to work with the library, copyright office, the committee and stakeholders to achieve our shared goals. I'm looking forward to adding value to this committee and providing a technical point of view on the needs of stakeholders like Amazon. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. I would pass it on to the next person, Susan from the Recording Industry Association of America. Feel free to turn on your microphone and camera. >> I'm on. Can you see and hear me? >> We sure can. Thank you, Susan. >> Thank you. Good afternoon office staff, fellow committee members. My name is Susan [ indiscernible ] and I'm the senior vice president for legal and regulatory affairs at the RIAA, Recording Industry Association of America. I've been with RIAA for over 20 years which has allowed me to witness the entire shift from a physical based industry to a digital based industry. In my role at RIAA I'm the person that drafts most of the comments we file with the copyright office on various policy issues which have included a range of modernization related issues, and as a result I've been following the modernization issues very closely for many years. I also interface regularly with the copyright office on behalf of my members when they have issues or problems, they need someone to trouble shoot something with the registration process or recordation issues. So again, I'm fairly deeply involved in the issues of recordation, registration. We are regular users of the public search function and I also work on licensing issues as well. I view my role here principally to represent the views of content owners and creators and users of the copyright office's services and external facing I.T. systems. I hope to act as a liaison between the committee and the user committee -- or the user community as this process rolls on. It's an honor to be on this committee and it's a testament to the respect and value that the library and co So many people from so many segments of the creative and digital ecosystem have come together to support this work. It's really great to see the variety of different viewpoints that are represented on this committee. As our CEO, Mitch Glazier, says, the value of unity, cooperation and working together, even with segments with the industry or community where we see things differently, is essential. For our part, we see modernizing the copyright offices I.T. capabilities as essential. It's technical but it's tile important. Copyrights are embedded in our constitution. Congress has supported this, including recognizing the importance of supporting music creators and the need for resources to have a well functioning, efficient and accessible copyright office. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that copyright industries contribute $1.5 trillion in GDP and create 1.5 million jobs. The music industry contributes $170 billion to the economy and 2.7 million jobs. Use of copyrighted works is a core mission of the copyright office and having the right I.T. infrastructure to serve this mission is essential as the copyright has itself has said. Modernized technology is a cornerstone of a modern copyright system. The recent Supreme Court decision in the state versus Wall Street which held that a copyright infringement suit must wait until the copyright is successfully registered by the copyright office has put a premium on having an I.T. system that can support a speedy, efficient and accurate registration process. That is one of the key priorities for RIAA's member companies. The challenge of having a speedy, efficient and accurate registration process grows more complex as the scale of music continues to grow. By some reports there's nearly 60,000 songs that are uploaded to music services each day. If all of those songs are registered, that's a high volume just coming in from the music community, and no doubt all the other creative arts are experiencing similar digital booms. The copyright office has made tremendous efforts in this regard but it's been candid about the challenges it has faced. We welcome the expanded visibility into the modernization process that this committee will afford. That's been one of the issues that has percolated around for a while, is the user community wanting more insight into the process. Thank you, I look forward to participating in today's discussion and future discussions of this important community. >> Thank you so much, Susan. Our next member of the copyright public modernization committee will be Bruster Kale. Feel free to start your camera and microphone. You're joining us from an undisclosed Starbucks and if there's any audio or connection difficulties, we'll revisit. >> Thank you very much. Can you hear me? We provide access to materials, for instance, by trying to make all the references in Wikipedia turn blue so people that want to go deeper can go deeper, as well as the way back machine. I really appreciate being invited to be on this committee. Tech makes all sorts of things easy that used to be really hard. Let's take advantage of it and do something really interesting with this committee and with really bringing some new and better services to the internet. The internet archive is interested in concretely helping and I believe has been helping. For instance, let's distribute all the copyright registration information and the renewal records to everybody, not just in that awesome user interface that we've been hearing about but also in bulk because there's lots of things that we can do in data mining these materials to make them more useful and integrated into our systems to make the copyright office aware. We can also do something else. We can start to collect materials in digital form, not just the metadata. The Library of Congress of course has awesome collections of physical materials and now more and more digital collections, so if this was part of how the registration system worked, it would really aid in copyright lookups. You could use this approach to do searches to be able to find out what's where. For instance, this could help with music, which there's lots of music and a lot of songs are kind of named the same thing. Being able to go and do these sorts of searches in new and different ways as well as going and building the collections of the Library of Congress is very important. The integration of the copyright office with the Library of Congress has been there for centuries and I think we can leverage it more and better. The internet archive has been involved in several initiatives with the Library of Congress as well as independently to make the copyright registration records available. We've digitized the books and gone and used those to go and effectively search to find the copyright status of thousands of periodicals. So it is possible the user interface is going to be great but bulk access is important. We've also experimented with OCRing the cards. The copyright office digitized the cards but they didn't make them massively available so we digitized those and OCRed them and make those available. I look forward to being helpful in a concrete way, listening to what it is that might be necessary, but I think we need to go beyond the. UI which is very important to do but bulk access to the data. I look forward to this committee. It's very important and timely. Thank you very much. >> Thank you so much. We've got Roy Kaufman of the Copyright Clearance Center. Please feel free to turn on your microphone and video. >> I have so hopefully you can see me. >> We sure can. Thank you, sir. >> Hello. I'm Roy Kaufman. I want to begin by thanking the Library of Congress and the copyright office both for convening this group but more importantly for engaging in what might feel like a thankless task of copyright office modernization. It's very important and we're glad you're doing it. For those who don't know me, I'm a lawyer by training. I spent about 17 years working with science publishing before joining Copyright Clearance Center. Like Todd I'm also a book author and author of other materials. I belong to the Copyright Alliance. I am on the editorial board of a library science journal called UKSG insights. I work for the United States government through an international trade adviser committee intellectual property. For those who want to know a little more about Copyright Clearance Center, we are best known as the U.S. collective management organization for the licensing of text. So we license text in K-12, higher ed and to more than 30,000 businesses globally. The suppliers, publishers, rightsholders, more than 12,000 of them participating across various programs. Somewhat less known to people less familiar with CCC is that we are a software company. Everyone says they're a software company but we actually develop and create software both for our own use and for that of our clients. Publishers use our software to enable licensing and also to manage the relationships they have with their customers and authors around open access publishing. On the user side we have a lot of software that enables or supports research, particularly for research intensive corporations, pharma R and D, chemical R and D, food R and D. I mention this because first of all I don't pretend to speak for anyone but myself and maybe even CCC. I certainly don't speak for the publishing community or the research community, but we do have insight into their needs which I'd like to be able to bring into this process. CCC. C like the library uses agile methodologies. We believe it's fit for purpose. It's a great way of doing it. With respect to what we would like to see, we specifically think there should be user stories, and this is going to pick up a theme I've already heard from some of the other speakers around openness of the records and specifically connecting the records of the copyright office with other records that have been developed, community developed records that exist elsewhere. For example, we have lots of standards, standard identifiers for different types of work, standard identifiers for individuals so that the same song, work or name doesn't get confused with the same person, and a system that brings together all of this community developed material I think would be a great win for the copyright office, a great win for copyright and great win for authors, commerce and users. So what could this be? This could be developing new work flows. I don't think the copyright office has to build everything. It has to build an infrastructure where others can build. Imagine you have to register a work for ISWC or ISVP maybe through an API call, you can develop registration systems at the same time. Thank you, David, I see that. Susan said there's a whole lot of songs coming out every day. Probably not all those are registered for copyright but they will have a work flow usually connected with a CMO -- sorry, acronym in the music collecting societies. We see that these things can be done. I don't think they require changes in the law. They don't require changes in copyright policy. They don't require changes in legal presumption. So the copyright office has certain things it has to do in a certain way. We acknowledge that. There's more that can be done just to bring value to the ecosystem. I'll stop talking. Thank you. >> Thank you, Roy. Our next committee member is Keith Cooper of the Copyright Alliance. >> Good afternoon, everybody. Thrilled, happy to be on this committee. My name is Keith, the CEO of the Copyright Alliance. For those unfamiliar with the Copyright Alliance, it's a nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest and educational organization representing the copyright interests of around 2 million individual creators in over 13,000 organizations in the United States across a spectrum of copyright disciplines. We're dedicated to advocating policies that promote and preserve the value of copyright and to protecting the rights of creators and innovators. Not surprisingly, the individual creators and organizations that we represent rely on copyright law and more importantly for today's meetings, the copyright creative services to protect their investments in the creation and distribution of new copyrighted works for the public to enjoy. I want to begin by thanking the library and the copyright office for establishing this committee and for inviting me to be a member. I think everyone on the committee certainly recognizes that the copyright office plays a tremendous role within the ecosystem, the ability of our nation's individual creators and the businesses that support their work to promptly register and promptly record copyrighted interests with the office and of the public to obtain copyright information that encompet With many ongoing and rapid changes in the information, entertainment and technology sectors which we've seen over the last several years, the copyright office has never been more important than it is today in ensuring that copyright owners have access to critical services that support their endeavors. It should come as no surprise that the Copyright Alliance has long supported modernization of the copyrighted I.T. systems for services such as registration, recordation and public search functions. Improving I.T. systems should make registration recordation easier while also improving processing times and reducing costs. It will provide benefits to users of the database and the general public in the form of robust, up to date and searchable ownership and licensing information. We at the Copyright Alliance understand what a mass undertaking this is and how many viewpoints they need to take into account to make these systems work effectively. An iter ray tav approach toward development that allows systems to be easily adjusted by the project seems like the correct approach as long as it continues to tatom I look forward to discussing the framework today in further detail. I have quite a few questions about it myself. As the project moves forward, we hope the Library of Congress, the OCIO and the U.S. copyright office and others who may be involved in the copyright office modernization initiative keep in mind several principles to get its efforts. First, the characteristics of copyright owners who register their works within the copyright office vary immensely in the type and number of works they create, register and record. The frequency of the registrations, the manner in which they register and the size of the copyright owner and many other valuables. It is therefore essential that new systems designed by the OCIO for the copyright office be accomplished in a way that's flexible enough to address the different uses and needs of . Second, technology is not static, nor are our nation's copyright laws in creating any new system, the OCIO should assume that change is around the corner. We all recognize and agree that the new registration recordation system should not just make a digital version of the paper process. It is critical that any new systems created by the OCIO for the copyright office be designed in a way that's flexible, scaleable and adaptable to accommodate the change and future growth that is inevitabl Lastly, given the global and dynamic characteristics of the copyright ecosystem, the modernization project should result in a copyright office that's able to offer the systems, tools and resources that all users of the office's services demand and that all copyright office records and systems be easy to navigate, intuitive, have a consistent interface, employ effective and commercial and reasonable security measures and be fully integrated into comprehensive systems of copyright records. Once again, in closing, I want to thank the library for establishing this committee and holding these meetings. I'm hopeful that I and the other committee members, as well as any others in attendance can learn more about the modernization process through these meetings including the progress that's been made to date and any obstacles that have been encountered and to provide any input into the process. I look forward to participating in today's meeting and future meetings, and the very last thing I want to do is wish Bud the best in his retirement and to congratulate Judith on her recent promotion. Thanks, everybody. >> Thank you, Keith, and thank you for the kind sentiments. Melissa Levine of the University of Michigan library is our next member. >> Thank you, David. I'm the director of the copyright office at the University of Michigan library. I want express my gratitude for the opportunity to serve on this committee. I look forward to getting to know all of you as we dive into our work. I'm particularly pleased to be joining you from my actual office on a lovely sunny Ann Arbor day on our campus. I've been at the University of Michigan library for a little over a decade. Our mission is to support, enhance, and collaborate in the instructional research and service activities of faculty, students and staff and contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, sharing and creating the record of human knowledge. I provide education, information and policy support to the library, and our campus community of students, scholars, faculty, researchers and more because copyright touches on almost every aspect of our information ecosystem. As part of the research director's group in our library I spend much of my time lately on matters of open access, open research, and open scholarship. I also provide policy and planning support to the digital library and was recently named to the International Federation of Libraries committee on copyright and related matters. I'm also working to establish a program for copyright education to empower our students who are learning to be artists, musicians, writers and other creatives on our campus. Early in my career I handled business affairs for the Smithsonian and a number of public/private partnerships and later worked at the Library of Congress on the American memory project which was the first major digital library initiative for the Library of Congress in the mid 1990s. This gave me key opportunities to learn about the Library of Congress, its collections, digitalization technologies affecting all media and the unique relationship between the Library of Congress and the U.S. Over relied on the records of the United States copyright office, registrations, renewals, transfers, assignments, data in the catalog of crept entries made available through internet archive. For my work with educational institutions, libraries and archives and museums over the years I've gained a particular interest in the importance of public access to copyright office information. The emphasis on U.S. is vital for meaningful access to copyright records, ensuring a work flow that contemplates support for the collection development by or through the Library of Congress. Conference in the integrity of copyright information is another area of concern. Thinking about the collections and metadata in creative ways will be of tremendous benefit to our country and globally. Again, I want to express my gratitude to librarian Hayden and the register and the U.S. copyright staff for the transparency of this project and intentional consideration of the public interest. I thank you for the opportunity to work with all of you on this project. I think you got a couple minutes back, David. >> That was impressive. I didn't even have to get out my sticky note. Thank you, Melissa. Our next member to provide opening remarks is Pamela, the association of American literary agents copyright committee co-chair. >> Thank you, David. My name is Pamela [ indiscernible ]. I'm with the association of American literary agents. I might be speaking a little less in terms of time than some of the other speakers have. I'm going to focus a little more on my background and qualifications for being here than maybe expressing some opinions, although to the extent that I speak on behalf of authors and agents, we're a community that is very excited about the prospect of modern copyright registration systems anegis I'm a literary agent. I represent writers of fiction and nonfiction. I've spent three decades as a publishing professional working with authors and publishers in formats ranging from pre-publication, the earliest forms of digital publication, and formatted books. For the past 20 years I've been a literary agent working in digital audio, full range formats. I'm a member of the association of American literary agents, also of the author's guild. I'm active in the book industry study group and I'm a data and database enthusiast. Copyright is not only the underpinning of my work, securing the monetary value of my client's work, but an area of focus as I am the founder and co-chair of the association of American literary agents copyright committee. In my early career I developed digital publishing products that required coordinating software development and editorial processes as a product manager for development of a publishing program. I was a conduit between developsers, writers, management in the development of publishing systems. The process of building data testing, debugging, all of that is very familiar to me. As a rights director, I'm one of America's oldest literary agents. I spearheaded projects involving copyrights for lost works by literary states including J.D. Salinger, those involved complex management of international copyright organizations so I'm familiar with some of the differences in U.S. copyright and foreign understandings of copyright. Research and copyright registrations and renewals for works is an essential part of managing literary estates in particular so I've done my fair share of moving around in copyright office data systems. I've also managed, built, implemented data and information systems, the transformation of data into information is genuinely fascinating to me. Among the most challenging projects I've confronted in my career was the task of migrating an entire office to a digital database. So that painful process is familiar to me. I have hands-on experience in data normalization, query building and processes inherent to information management systems. In the publishing business what we call a rights management which is creating rights, licensing rights, reverting rights, all the rest of that of course has its foundation in copyright and the systems that manage copyright records, recordations, registrations, everything else, are obviously closely related to the work of authors, agents, publishers. The copyright and information systems are both areas of personal avid interest so I really look forward to working with this CPMC. I hope my experience working on both sides and on behalf of copyright holders but also in building both practitioner oriented and public facing systems will be helpful too. I hope to contribute meaningfully to the CPMC. That's it for me. >> Our next presenter is Micah May of the Digital Public Library of America. >> Thank you, David. I'm thrilled and honored to be part of this group. A little about me, I have a law degree from Harvard law. I thought I was going to be an environmental lawyer until I worked in the industry and changed my mind and went to McKenzie and company as a consultant. From there I became director of strategy at the New York public library. Since then I've enjoyed a wonderful 12 years in library land. While at New York public library I was the first introduced agile to the web and team so I was thrilled to hear all the great principles and practices that you're rolling out as part of this. I think that's a really good fit and wonderful that those are going to guide this work. I moved to DPLA in 2017 where I am now the director of E book services. So a little about DPLA, the digital Public Library of America, our mission is to empower people to learn, grow and contribute to a diverse and better functioning society by maximizing access to our shared history, culture and knowledge. The key phrase is really maximizing access and we do that both pie providing access directly to end users but also very much by helping institutions, especially libraries, to make their content more discoverable and accessible online. DPLA was founded in 2013 and came out of the convening which some of you were part of at the Burkman center in 2010. There was a long process of community grassroots engagement that led to the actual launch of the organization in 2013. We serve as a bridge between libraries and other cultural institutions and stakeholders of all kinds trying to connect people. All of our work and our approach is guided by three principles. We focus on proactive collaboration. We believe that institutions are stronger when we work together. We seek out partners in everything we do. We've partnered with many folks on this call to advance projects. We believe equity and inclusion needs to guide everything that we do so all of our work contributes to a more equitable society. We believe in the potential of technology and believe it can move us forward as make things better. We believe in that transformational potential and want to be part of it. In terms of why we care about copyright, our chief goal is to help libraries maximize access to copyrighted works, out of copyright works and everything in between. We believe that ultimately creators and libraries are on the same team, team reading in the case of books, and that we want to maximize win-wins as much as we can between copyright holders and creators and cultural heritage institutions including libraries that help provide access for Americans. In terms of our relevant work, we work directly with publishers to try to create the best possible access for libraries to copyrighted books. We have approaching a million titles in the DPLA exchange where we've been able to negotiate better licensing terms. We also work on openly licensed materials. So we aggregate the open bookshelf which is over 10,000 openly licensed books and audio books reviewed by our curation core of librarians from across the country. Within the open bookshelf work we have done publishing work ourselves, so we did, for example, E book version of the Mueller report that won a publishing award because it was the only free, openly accessible, high quality E pub of that publication. We believe those kinds of things should be available to everyone in the country. We've also helped libraries create high quality open copies of E books. We also, through the DP.LA network help cultural heritage institutions provide access to over 44 million items, many of which are openly licensed. Some are not. We've recently added a rights facet that helps people determine the rights associated with those works. We consistently work with libraries to help them innovate and make sure that they can provide the most digital access possible. I very much agree we need to make sure that the digital context is expanding access, not contracting it. Again, at DPLA our mission is to maximize access to information for Americans. We want to ensure that in a digital age we become more, not less accessible, that we maximize the win-wins that we think are available between rightsholders and libraries and really make sure that this project and the digital context moves access forward and makes access more available. We want to make sure that copyrights facilitates those win-wins and doesn't unduly restrict it. Thank you all. I'm excited and honored to be part of this group. >> Our next member of the copyright public modernization committee member to speak is Jim Neil of Columbia University. >> Good afternoon. Good morning to my colleagues on the west coast. Thanks to the Library of Congress and the copyright office for this critically important work and for involving us in this project. My name is Jim Neil. I'm university librarian emeritus at Columbia University in New York and also a senior policy fellow at the American library association. I have served as a library administrator and director for five U.S. research universities over nearly 50 years, participating in the technological and digital transformation of these institutions. Over the last 30 years, my responsibilities have expanded to include university-wide computing. At Columbia, I also served as the vice president for information services leading teams of I.T. professionals in the areas of network services, administration systems, security, instructional technologies, research computing, digital systems and information policy. I've been very active in national and international copyright matters starting in the late 1980s, focused on copyright policy and reform. This has included testimony before congressional committees, service as an adviser to the U.S. delegation at the 1996 diplomatic conference on copyright and service on the Library of Congress 108 study group. I've been very active in these copyright matters also through the support that my institutions have provided to faculty, students and researchers and their use of copyright office processes and services. I've participated in several large scale modernization initiatives. The enterprise resource planning at Columbia to implement software and systems to manage all financial and business processes across the entire university, the work at OCLC where I have served on the board for the last 12 years to modernize the global infrastructure, the systems and applications in support of 10,000 libraries worldwide. The program at the American library association, I've served on the executive board as the treasurer and president to review and replace technologies and modernize and integrate services. What are my particular interests in the modernization program? I have five points I'll cite. What are the enterprise characteristics of the project? Software as service, support for all activities, flow of data across all applications, common interface, support for copyright creators, copyright managers and copyright consumers. Second, is the work responsive to a question and equation that I often pose? Does quality equal content plus functionality? What are the sources and the flow of data which underpin the system? Is the data mineable, comprehensive, current, accurate, relevant, secure? This is a big data project. Third, what are the plans for user testing, training, accessibility, assessment, organizational and cultural change at LC and the community? All of these are essential to the success of enterprise systems implementation. Fourth, what are the systems and services? Are they agile? Are they scaleable, adaptable, responsive to emerging technologies? I know this is an issue that's been raised and I think it's critically important. Fifth, how will the system interface with diversity, equity and inclusion, and how will it interface on a global scale? I hope that my administrative, technology, copyright and modernization project experience will be helpful to the work of the committee. I look very forward to working with my colleagues at LC, the copyright office, and on this committee. Thank you. >> The next member will be Kathleen Rodriguez of Warner media. >> Good afternoon. I'm grateful to be here and appreciate the opportunity to be part of this committee. My name is Kathleen Rodriguez and I am a senior parallel at Warner media. I've been with the company including Time Warner for 23 years and I've been involved in the copyright registration and document recordation process which has evolved from the days when we were required to submit paper applications and ship boxes of deposit materials to the USCO to where we are today submitting onO sys A little about our company, Warner Media is a global media and entertainment company that creates and delivers world class content through some of the most iconic brands in the world including Cartoon Network, CNN, D.C. Comics, HBO, TNT, Warner Brothers and more. Last year in 2020 we launched our streaming service, HBO Max. As a world leader in creating premium content, Warner Media gives protection of our IP the highest priority. We're looking forward to being part of the latest modernization efforts and we look forward to balancing efficiency of process with the need to protect deposit materials from piracy. I'm one of a team of five who register and record copyrights for the collective Warner Media companies making us a high volume user of the USCO's services. On average we file over 4500 per year to register and record works with the USCO. The type of works we routinely register include motion pictures such as television series and major theatrical films, screenplays, style guides, comic books, computer programs, sourced code and video games. We also record copyright related documents in connection with these categories of works, and we use the copyright public records catalog for title research. We appreciate the USCO's modernization efforts thus far and look forward to collaborating on further advancements with the other panelists on this committee. Thank you. I guess I'm the shortest. >> You're going to get a sticker later for that. Jeff of the picture licensing universal system, or PLUS coalition, is next. >> Thanks, David. I'm the president and CEO of the PLUS coalition. I'm also a professional photographer here in Pasadena, California. I appreciate the opportunity to participate as an adviser on modernization of the copyright office. First a bit of background on the plus coalition. We're a nonprofit neutral coalition of museums, libraries, publishers, researchers, educational institutions, creators, designers, advertising agencies, design firms, sister organizations and others spanning 120 countries. Our mission is to simplify and facilitate the communication and management of rights information for visual art works. It's worthwhile to note that the plus coalition was founded at the suggestion of former register Mary Beth Peters and has been operating for 13 years. Our standards are in broad use in applications used for creating and distributing, using and preserving visual art works. Adobe integrated the plus standards and in Google search results. The plus coalition welcomes participation by stakeholders in all communities. You can learn more about us at plus.org. I'm also participating on behalf of the American photographic artists, the professional photographers of America, the national press photographers association, the graphic artist guild, the North American nature photographers association, the American Society of media photographers and the American Society for collective rights licensing. As a member of this new committee, I appreciate the promise of a user focused system for registration, recordation and other interactions between the public and the copyright office. I've personally participated in user testing of various systems under development and I'm very encouraged by the expertise and passion of the team and what I've seen to date. In my brief introduction today I'm going to mention two worthy goals. First, I'm particularly interested in furthering the development and availability of APIs to permit the public to use third party applications to register their works, search the registration database and otherwise interact with the copyright office systems. In this way the office can leverage the vast technology resources across the marketplace. Most importantly, the use of APIs will permit claimant's to use applications to more efficiently register their works in the limited time they have available to do so. I'm particularly interested in increasing the efficiency of the registration and examination process, especially for visual arts which will provide significant benefit to the public and permit the copyright office to lower its internal costs of processing registrations which will allow the copyright office hopefully to decrease the fees associated with registrations and in particular for visual works and specifically for photography and illustration to permit a significant increase in egis It's currently limited due to inefficiencies in the examination process that are due to the application that the examiners are forced to use. All that should go away in the near future. This will allow claimants to submit published and unpublished works on a single registration. Many professional photographers create over 1,000 photographs a week, some 1,000 a day. Taking that 1,000 new works per week as a measure, to register those new works under the limitation would require 6 to 8 registrations per month. That's 72 to 96 per year, requiring that a photographer pay up to $5300 a year in registration fees. That might not be very much for an enterprise but a lot of photographers make $30,000 or $40,000 per year and registration fees are 13% of their income. They're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can't afford to register and they can't afford not to register. These are two important goals for modernization and I have many more. I thank the library for establishing this committee and holding these meetings and look forward to supporting your verities. >> The final panelist this morning is Scott [ indiscernible ] of the association of computers and humanities. >> Thanks, David. Hi, everyone. I'm here representing the association for computers and the humanities which is the major U.S.-based digital humanities professional society. I'm on the executive board of the international alliance of digital humanities organizations and I direct the family have for digital scholarship at the university of Notre Dame. I am a historian of skin, data scientist, have worked on large scale analyses and infrastructures for cultural heritage collections. I previously directed initiatives at Indiana university, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the national library of the Netherlands. I'm the author of books and articles on topics from folklore to [ indiscernible ] and an occasional software developer. My interest in the copyright public modernization committee is to represent my scholarly peers from the association for computers and the humanities. In addition to our authoring and publication interests, our community makes regular use of copyright records for purchase. We use individual records in aid of finding further resources and use records and maps as part of large scale analyses. Our organization has been involved in the digitalization and legal ramifications of large scale text. Interfacing with copyright records is an essential part of that process, one at a time and via algorithmically. We represent librarians, archivists and publishers who interact with the copyright office in their various roles. With that, I think I'll end a bit early and thank you, David, and everyone so much for the opportunity to be part of this committee. I'm very much looking forward to working with all of you over the next few years. >> Thank you so much, and thank you to the rest of the panelists. In a minute we're going to come back and I'm going to talk through some of the main themes that I heard during this and then we'll open up for a panel discussion. Because we're running a couple of minutes ahead of time we have time for a quick bio break. We're going to pause the session for five minutes and I'm going to set the same timer I've been using to time the members of the committee for their remarks. We'll come back at 30 on the dot. Thank you all so much for jong in and we'll see you shortly. >>> All right, I'd like to start by thanking everyone for those opening remarks. It's an extraordinary group we've assembled here today. I heard so many great topics mentioned by panelists. I heard much experience with software implementation. I heard the phrase we're all software companies now. I suppose that's not true if the copyright office were a software agency, not a software company. I heard a lot of excitement about the stage that we are in the copyright system now. I heard the question about what can the role of community developed standards, standard identifiers be in the copyright ecosystem. I heard the desire to incorporate copyright registration, recordation, licensing into work flows. I heard the need for APIs and bulk data. I heard about access to pilots and prototypes. Then we received a question from a member of the public which I'm going to address now, how does one's organization or does a person become a member of the copyright modernization committee. Earlier the Library of Congress announced the forming of this committee and solicited applications, then it went through a review period and the librarian appointed the 13 people who are with us today. We'll be meeting twice a year over the remaining years of the copyright modernization process. I'd like now to invite the panelists to turn on your cameras and be ready to turn on your microphones as we move into our panel discussion period. I want people to know that as we have more of these events and know each other better, I would anticipate that we'll spend less time with introducing ourselves to one another and more time on some of the longer and more substantive discussions. I wanted to start out with a question that was actually raised by the panel, by several of the panelists during the time. We heard from lots of folks that user centered design and that software implementation are part of their day to day work. I wanted to hear if there are lessons that people would like to share, that panelists would like to share with the Library of Congress and the copyright office from software implementations that have gone on in each of your organizations. I would also encourage that if you have specific questions for the copyright office or the agency, now would be a time to begin to raise those questions as well. I'm not guaranteeing we'll have an opportunity to answer every question on this session. We have limited time. But I would remind the panelists and members of the public that the crew that we've assembled here today are experts in the software implementation side of things. These are people who are prioritizing from the business side and doing implementation from the I.T. side and with the set of people today are not people who are prepared to speak on policy and on legal matters of the copyright office. I would encourage everyone to remember as the register of copyrights stated in her opening remarks, we're very, very open to those discussions and there are formal mechanisms for going through the process of the policy making process, but that we'd like to commit the time today to focusing on I.T. implementations. With that, would any of the panelists like to start out? We're going to do this a little different than the opening remarks. Think about keeping your responses in the 30 to 60-second range and feel free to unmute and jump in but if you feel like you're not getting in, message me or use the raised hand function that the panelists have been provided with. Finally, if there are questions that we are going to direct back to the agency, I'll field those questions and do my best to determine which person on the agency side would be most suitable for answering them. Would anyone like to start by sharing lessons from their own software implementation, if there are specific lessons learned that the copyright office should be thinking about? >> Can I jump in? If it's okay, I'll base my experiences on prior experiences because I'm on the policy side and we're not going to talk about policy here today. My prior experience as an engineer and working on various projects, I would say just shared experiences, having a common lexicon is significantly important. You have lots -- especially in really, really large groups, you want people using the same terminology so everyone knows what everyone's talking about. I know that was something that the OIG I think two years ago identified as an issue for the OCIO and the copyright office. That for me is one of the shared lessons. Communication is obviously a significant factor in a large group like this, having people share information almost on a daily basis. What we heard earlier today about the scrums, the daily scrums and things like that are essential to making sure that if somebody is going in the wrong direction you can say wait a minute, or if somebody found out a new demand or requirement or problem, that that can be worked into the program without a huge setback. Since you asked us to limit it to 30 seconds, I'll stop there. >> Thank you. Bruster, would you go next? >> Yes. Openness is your friend. It's going to be a difficult lesson for the copyright office to hear because if you open up, lots of people want to help. It may feel like criticism but think of it as commentary. Guttenberg corrected and hosting and Stanford and lots of others and it may seem like competition but think of it as all people trying to help it go forward. I think it's going to be really tough as a government group to feel that love in a place where it may be always interpreted as criticism. I would put stuff out there, invite a lot of people to do summer projects with your data. You've got the blessing of openness. There's nothing about this stuff that's copyrighted, thank God. Go forth and have fun and iterate like nuts. >> We're definitely feeling the love today, thank you. Jeff? >> In agile development which I fully support, there is a temptation to pick off the lowest hanging fruit and develop that first. What can happen -- and I have personal experience with that -- is you might develop -- I'll use a specific example. Right now they've been working on the standard application for many months. The standard application does not have the same complexity as the group registration forums. The group registration forums, when the team hits that, might require a redesign of the standard application or make them consistent so the public doesn't see completely different things when they're looking at two different areas. My suggestion is not to pick off lowest hanging fruit. Even if you're moving quickly you need to consider where you're going to be and that group registration is a beast. In my user testing I noted that to the team and I think they did take notes. >> Thank you, Jeff. Jim. >> In my experience working with user centered design I think it's very important that the designers and the users be seen as equal in the process. People come to this work with different experience and skill levels. I've seen projects flounder because the designers will talk down to the users, or users think they know everything. It's very important that equality be established. It also means a commitment to education, to educate all the players and parties involved in it to have a common understanding. I think vocabulary was a good selection of how that might work as well. But I think that's very important. >> Scott. >> I would encourage you to take inspiration from your peers at the Library of Congress labs who a few years ago I believe or maybe just recently put together a page of Library of Congress for robots in understanding that users are not just people but now this this bold future that we live in are often large algorithmic systems. So making sure that when you're designing, you are designing with not just individuals in mind but these large systems in mind as co-equal users. >> Kathleen, Melissa, Pamela, Roy, any additional thoughts about the topic of I.T. implementation and lessons learned from your organizations? >> I'm in New York City so if the noise behind me is loud, let me know. It sounds loud to me. There was a phrase I think you used, David, early on when you were describing this committee and that this committee is going to exist for the -- if I misquoted you, you said the modernization period or the two years you're doing this modernization effort. Modernization doesn't end. Whatever you've done in two years, if you want it to be modern, it won't be in two years and a quarter unless you're constantly modernizing. So just keep that in mind. You don't come out and say we're done and then move on, or else you end up with systems their almost instantly antiquated, particularly how quickly things are moving today. >> So true, Roy. Thank you. Hopefully folks heard the remarks from the register at the beginning of this talking about her two guide posts for this, one of which is continuous modernization. Susan, would you go next? >> Yes, I just wanted to lean into something that Keith said which was emphasizing how many different kinds of users there are and how many different kinds of works there are and to ask a question as to how you generate your pilot users or your other -- the users from whom you're getting input. Obviously if you're looking for volunteers you can't constrict people but it seems really important that you're getting a broad cross-section and it goes to what Jeff was saying too, not just people registering individual works one at a time, people that are registering groups of work in all formats, all media, all types of work. So I guess it's really a question which is how do you make sure you have a cross-section in your test group? >> Thank you, Susan. I wanted to reiterate that one of the things that I've been hearing a lot throughout this session is why diversity of users and the desire to increase the diversity of the user pool. We've got a couple of people on the line who I think can be quite informative and helpful about this specifically. Obviously the people who are members of this committee are aware of the formal process, the notice of rulemaking, the notice of inquiry, those kinds of processes, but before we get to Pamela and Micah for comments on this, I wonder if Natalie, our director of user experience and design, would want to give a quick synopsis of how we find users to test the products that proces >> I also want to address -- diversity and inclusion is very important to us and we try to be as diverse and inclusive across the software development life cycle. We're not only testing one way with a group of people. We're doing formative testing. Some of you will have heard about us testing with actual users in the prototyping wire framing, more of the conceptual phases of a project. Then we also do value testing. We're showing the code in development or in pilot, something that's more towards the end of the software development life cycle, so we're making sure we're doing user research and including users and getting feedback at all phases of the life cycle. We're not waiting until the end. We really want input all along the way in an iterative and as up front as possible because that's when we can make the right change with the least amount of technical debt. We're also doing qualitative testing as well as quantitative testing. Some of you have backgrounds in this so you know the difference but with qualitative testing we spend an hour or so with an individual and get in depth feedback on a feature or a prototype that is really -- sets the context and gives us the understanding of how it's being used and what are their thought spruce. processes. Then we do quantitative testing which allows us to reach a larger amount of people that tends to be more structured. Qualitative testing is less structured, more free flowing. Quantitative is more structured but we can actually include more people, more audiences when we do quantitative. Again, I can talk on this subject for hours. Sorry, I'm -- David, I'm waiting for that post-it to go up. We do include users and have established lists like you heard Sarah earlier invite people to send in your names if you want to be involved. So we have established lists that we pull from that we're constantly adding people to. When we do testing, depending on qualitative, quantitative, which service we're testing, we put together a profile based on personas in order to find the right types of people to test that specific feature or prototype so that we are being diverse, inclusive and getting a range of users, a range of personas that we've established a while back. >> So on the topic of Natalie talking for hours, I hope people are aware that we have a number of webinars that we've done along the way as we've gotten into copyright I.T. modernization. As we move through the next set of questions I'm cognizant of keeping the conversation going but getting a wide array of perspectives. I'm going to error on the side of calling on members of the committee who have not yet spoken. Pamela, I'd like you to go next and then Micah and then Todd and Brewster again. >> Thank you. I was going to spend to a couple of the previous remarks. One was on the idea that modernization is a moving target and we're always reaching for it. One of the components is not just the system itself but the information that the system is trying to record. In other words, right now we might look at classifications of creative work of visual art or performance as forms of creativity change in response to technologies. How we classify creative content also changes and that is -- I'm sure your designers have thought through this but I think that's a real challenge for the definitions the stakeholders involved in those perhaps collaborative works or works that might be called one thing and then two years later called something else are really challenges. I think from the point of view of having developed systems for managing rights information, the point before digital audio streaming existed we didn Then suddenly it existed and we needed to figure that out. So building in a modular structure so that it's not just responsive to changes in copyright statutes but changes in users' perceptions, what exactly they're registering. >> Use patterns, right. >> Yeah. The other thing that is related to that and is important in developing systems that people are going to use is that the way people use the information drives what they value out of it, and vice-versa. Although the data may be a static thing that all that information is sitting behind the system, a creator's perception of why that system exists is one thing and a copyright user has a different perception of why they need to search those databases. I think it's really important to try to get both of those sides of the conversation involved. >> Right. I like that. Micah. >> I just posted a written version of what I'm going to say in the chat. One thing that jumps out at me in any system design is this idea of a vocal minority and a less vocal majority. I think in this context most of the folks on this call and most of what we're talking about contemplate users as basically creators and rightsholders and just recognizing that there are basically the entire country impacted by this downstream as users of copyrighted works. That's a little tricky I think. They're not users per se and I don't know if capturing them in personas would work very well or not. It would be an interesting tweak on agile. I guess I just wanted to make a vote for and remind us to think about how subtle decisions we make or you make in designing the system will have really big impacts potentially for lots of folks who are not very represented here because they're not actually going to be registrants of copyright. I would just make a plug for pushing ourselves to think about how these decisions and systems will impact those folks down the line and know that we're going to have lots of people signing up that own copyrights and the people that don't own a copyright are going to be harder. They're probably not following this or aware this is happening but ultimately the system should serve them as well so anything we can do to bring those stakeholder groups' interests into the process will b valuable. >> Todd? >> That was a great point, Micah. The people who are likely to be using these systems are not even -- more and more people are becoming creators with their phones, as technology expands. They don't really understand copyright and how the copyright office works or how the system works. Acknowledging that is going to be important. The reason I raised my hand is harkening back to what Natalie mentioned which is technical debt. Oftentimes organizations are wrapped up into, well, we have this old system and we need to accommodate it moving forward, rather than breaking and moving forward with a new system. I hope through this process the office isn't bound by what had been done. A lot of government agencies have a lot of technical debt and through this process I hope we're jettisoning some of that and building systems that recognize, as Roy mentioned, we're going to be moving through this process permanently so recognizing that even the things we're building today, three to five years from now might be considered technical debt in the future. >> I would like to -- building on a couple points about users of the system, the copyright public system is one of the systems that we have the most access to right now is a system where the vast majority of the users are not -- they're not there registering a copyright necessarily. Also, before I cut Natalie Smith off, I think one of the points that many of the users of these systems are non-IP law experts, particularly inside of libraries, and those are some of the users that we've had doing I'd like to turn to Brewster, then Melissa, then [ indiscernible ] and then Keith. Then we have a couple more questions in the chat as well. >> Thank you for having me. There's been a lot of talk about the UI which I think is great. Thank you, yes, please. I think your data is going to the thing that's going to drive this project bottom up and make it difficult. Your data is messy. All big data is messy. The existing registrations are kind of a mess, and the future ones, I think you could do a lot better job in making it so it works better. For instance, in the metadata, please invite people to use identifiers, ISBNs, ISSNs, those sorts of things. Consistent spellings of publisher names, they're all over the place. It's really challenging. When you start to get into registering born digital works, if you can bring those in, that will help. I think that's all quite possible but right now what exists is very difficult to use in any automated way. I guess the message is please invest in the data. Lots of people can help you. I think there's going to be attention of what's official, like what's real versus what's augmented or added on by somebody else. How do you make those branches so that other people's information which may not be the copyright office from the original record but it's going to be helpful to people downstr I think it's servicing provenance of where did the information come from so you can envelope other types of information into your data sets to make it much more useful and much more searchable just to help correct things. Please don't be scared of the official if you have some mechanism of noting that these are additional aspects to the records that were supplied by other people kind of as Wikipedia has done or maybe more official than that. So augmenting your records, think about your data. >> Melissa? >> First, the LC lab is a wonderful model. I want to echo Brewster's comment that an openness is your friend. Barring anything that may be private information or sensitive in some way, most of this data is not and would benefit from the kind of flute use and application that several people have talked about. Also this issue of provenance of information, we can use the data in so many different ways and people can have a better sense of confidence in relying on decision-making that they may need to do if they know what the provenance of a given set of information is. I also wanted to flag, we're focusing on copyright office registration data mostly right now but I do want to have in the back of our minds the deposit process and where that exists or gets lost in this conversation, whether it's because of technical limitations or administrative issues. How do we think about the -- quote unquote -- best edition and what is that in electronic format and what does the Library of Congress use and other creative ways of distributing those responsibilitieitoi David, you had asked about things from our experience that might be helpful. One thing that's very organic that's made a big difference in my work has been including programmers in the conversations about the substance because we tend to think and approach things differently, whether we're lawyers or -- whatever your specialization is. I've found that in some projects we didn't include programmers in conversations but said make this work this way, and they did and it worked but not that well. As soon as they joined us for lunch they go, oh, now I understand what you're trying to do. I've wanted to do some professional conversations about how to work with your programmer and true to stereotype, this person was too -- doesn't want to be in front of people. I think that's a conversation to have. Pamela's comments were interesting to me about how do we categorize these works because it's not unusual to think you're looking at a book but its register is a poem and you miss it because you're going back and forth in the records. I really wonder, talking about this idea of technical debt, whether those categories need there at all anymore or if they are helpful in some way that it's a field but not necessarily definitive of the rest of the access to the record. On the subject of users versus copyright holders, most people are both. I work with students all the time, the initial conversation about copyright are I want to use everything and use it for free, and then a moment later, how do I protect my stuff. In our informal conversation, they need to know both of those things because if they're making a video for a class that incorporates sound or music or images, it may be appropriate for class. It may not be appropriate for vim yo. Helping them tease those things out and understanding that it's not an us/them universe by a long shot, maybe it never was but it really isn't now is quite significant for me. >> Thank you, Melissa. >> I love all the commentaries so far. The big thing in my space when specifically talking about software implementation is that I constantly deal with road map injections, new features, things are changing, IPs evolving and so are bad actors. We have to be quick about making sure our technologies are able to handle the biggest problem. Oftentimes how important that is is different for different stakeholders within Amazon. Our customers with sellers and buyers are all the various personas and we have all these tactical items coming in, fires we're trying to put out but at the same time I want to develop a product for the long term. We have a number of mechanisms internally we've used that have been successful for us to balance long-term development and the evaluation of where technology is and how we should modernize and move forward, which we call three-year plans against the tactical items that are injected constantly into the road map. Oftentimes these items are responding to things like policy changes, technological updates, culture changing and what consumers want, what clients, customers need. What we've typically done is we have a very transparent set of goals that are important for our business and important for our customers, as well as a set of ROI metrics, return on investment, where we have 100 things in our road map. We know exactly why they are where they are and we socialize this across the business. Whenever a new injection comes in and something has to fall off, we have to make sure our expectations are clear with our customers. People know what they're expecting to come and if things get pushed back or delayed we have to be very clear about why that occurred and why this is better for the long term state of things. Oftentimes based on the size or the severity of that escalation, we will make that move to quickly accommodate this while we're updating road maps but it's always at the top of our mind to make sure every stakeholder knows exactly when something is pushed back, why it's pushed back and it's reasonable and they can accommodate it and we'll work to see if we can find interim solutions. >> Keith and then immediately after I'm going to take one question from the public. >> There's been a lot said -- somebody had to do that, right? A lot said since I talked and spoke so let me start with what I first said which is lexicon. We heard Micah talk about users. When I talk about users and this is something we ought to come into an agreement like what word we're going to use, I'm talking about users of copyright office systems and information, whomever that may be. I'm not placing, despite the fact that I represent creators and copyright owners, one group over another. Obviously you got to get good information in to get good information out so we're going to have to make sure we get that good information in which is more the folks that I represent. Maybe we call them customers instead. That's something we ought to all agree on because at the end of the day what I'm hearing from a lot of folks is similar goals and purposes and support with what's going on. The second thing that came up that I wanted to respond to was the public records search system. There is a pilot right now, you can go to the website and do a search and they have the old system, I think called voyager, and the new system. I went to give feedback and if not for the help of a colleague of mine, I could not figure out how to give feedback. I think it's got to be more clear that this is a pilot and that you're looking for feedback from people because feedback is hidden next to contact information at the very bottom of the screen and things like that. This is to me a little bit different meeting than I thought it was going to be. I thought you were going to maybe look for not only our input but maybe questions about things so we'll see how that goes. The third comment, Brewster said data is going to drive his project. Yeah, that's true, but there's a whole bunch of other things that are going to drive the project too, right? If we start putting our individual goals over the goals of what the copyright office's goals should be, we will be misdirecting the copyright office and library. I don't think data is the driver. I think it is a driver. But there's a lot of drivers of this modernization project so I think if we start saying what's number one driver, I think we run into some problems. Melissa said a couple things about the provenance of information. I want to call people's attention to something called the content authenticity initiative which was announced a couple years ago by adobe, "The New York Times" and Twitter and it has a bunch of members since. If we're talking about the veracity and integrity of information, that's something that this group ought to be looking into. It's an open standard. That's something to potentially consider. Melissa also mentioned best edition, the definition. Look, I'm up for that, talking about that, but this is not about policy so I think that's for another forum. Happy to talk about that. Then she also talks about users are also creators these days and copyright owners, and I'm not going to disagree with that but I will kind of disagree on one point which is there is a difference. The creators that we represent, yes, they're users at times also but they are doing this for a living. They're trying to make careers, earn money off of this, and that's different than the person who's using the information. I think we have to be careful about that distinction. The last thing I'll say is I'm a little confused about the purpose of the committee. I'm hoping that we get an opportunity to ask some questions ourselves because I've got a bunch about the safe framework and how it's working and what caused the OCIO to switch to a scaled agile framework and things like that. So far it doesn't seem like the opportunity has arisen to ask those type of questions. I'll stop there. >> I think you just did and I think that's a good place to start and I don't have -- there have been a few comments to the moderator as well as one public question, as well as Keith's question right now. It can be summed up, what is the purpose of the copyright public modernization committee. I think this is an area where it's easy to get sidetracked. People come to the copyright public modernization committee with their own agenda and reason for being here, but I would like to recenter for a moment on what was the purpose of the Library of Congress to initiate this. I'm going to read from the summary, and this is possibly the most federal bureaucracy thing I've ever done. I'm reading from the federal register notice of convening I.T. modernization public stakeholder committee. The Library of Congress is convening a public committee to enhance communication and provide a public forum for the technology related aspects of the U.S. copyright office's modernization initiative. At this time the library is announcing that it will accept applications from qualified members of the public to serve on the committee. The scope are limited to the specific topics set forth in this notice. Membership will be on a volunteer basis with the expectation of in person or virtual participation at the member's own expense. I want to draw our attention back to that not because it is a satisfying answer but because it's the real answer. Assigning any purpose beyond the purpose of convening and taking in questions and asking questions. For the agency it's an opportunity to draw on the expertise of this group, and if the group has a strong feeling that the best way to run the expertise is to field questions and answer them in this context. That's the friendliest and most helpful thing and a thing we can talk about for future committees. It is our hope in this inaugural committee to get to know the participants, to get to show some of the work we've been doing, to get to hear the advice of experts from the field and also to get to answer questions. Pamela is going to give a quick remark next and then I'm going to turn a question back to the staff of the agency. >> I will keep it brief. I thought it was maybe worth remarking that this idea of the distinction between the users versus the creators which again we can get into taxonomy and discussions about what those labels mean but within the context of technology, development and creating an I.T. system that works, I sort of see it as the individual data records of a registration, of a recordation, of whatever piece of data is being scored. Then there's what you can do with the data which is the information that comes out of that. I think there are distinctions in the way that creators who may register copyrights but who may also consult databases to see what other stuff has been registered, they think of this as their safeguard. These are their assets to -- this stuff has real importance to them in monetary value. Some people who are researching that data have a different perspective and I think it's worth considering that where the level of privacy or safeguard lies. There's information that's being recorded that has a discreet value to the registrant or claimant, the copyright owner, but opening all of that up, opening it up maybe more broadly than we're accustomed to having it open is a little like -- I think for many copyright holders they view this as the library of their assets, the record of what they have that has value. Other people see it that way because they want to see what's been registered and what may not have. I think it's a little like asking someone to show their bank account, I want to see all of your assets. Nobody is interested in that. And yet, it feels like that's a data issue for the individual record versus the output that is possible to create or draw out sets of data that say these are things that you can determine are close to their PD status. I think those are important and as data becomes more accessible, those issues become more prominent. So when we move away from paper, that stuff becomes more possible and it becomes more important for us to address it as the system is being built. >> Thank you, Pamela. It seems like there's a strong appetite for some questions for staff of the agency. I'd like to invite -- I have some more of the prepared questions that I sent out but I'm curious if there are -- what questions do our panelists have that seem like -- whether they're answers that we have -- Susan, go ahead. >> >> I just wanted to touch on some sort of system issues that my members brought to my attention that we haven't touched on yet. They're kind of in the weeds and I'm not really sure where they fit in here. One is having to do with the payment processing system. Of course you can't register without paying fees, and my understanding is there's issues exiting out of the registration portal into pay.gov, glitches, things hang up. You lose your cart, issues like that and it takes a long time. Also, you're not able to get the same itemized receipt of all your transactions if you're registering multiple works as you are when you're using a deposit account. So that's one whole issue that we haven't touched on at all. Security, I think people have talked about that but again, in a digital world, my members' digital recordings are their absolute life line. If there was a way for people to siphon those out of the deposit system here, that would be just the worst possible thing that could happen. I know you guys talked about security, that you're complying with the standards. We would ask that you comply with industry standard security measures. For example, we would want to see sound recordings protected as well at the Library of Congress or the copyright office as they are in spotify. I'm sure the motion picture people want their stuff protected as well as Netflix does. Industry standard security measures. A couple of other quick things. This is related to the payment issue. When you're trying to register a volume of works which is what happens when you're a large copyright owner that registers lots of works, there's a lot of system glitches. You can't stay in it. You get kicked out, things like that. >> Susan, just to clarify, you're talking about the legacy system now? >> Whatever system my members are currently registering. >> Yeah, the current system. >> Yes. Which raises another question. You talked earlier about version two of the registration system. Is that going to be an improvement of eco or is that going to completely replace it? >> That's a great question. I'd like to pause there if it's okay because you've raised so many topics. I think if the panelists agree that the best use of our time is to go through a list of issues, I will say there are -- we have a lot of avenues for feedback on that. Specifically talking about the registration system, that is a full replacement of eco. The bugs and the problems that you talked about, those are literally our major reasons for undertaking the modernization effort. There are some long-standing problems. I hope I'm not showing my hand too much to share that for every glitch that's encountered by somebody who's registered a copyright, there are probably ten for the person on the inside of the agency who has to use the same system to go through the process. Those frustrations are certainly shared, and that's in the forefront of our mind as we develop the new systems. I did want to use this opportunity, since we have a number of staff from the agency on the line, to see if we could have a brief word about system security. I think we've got a couple of people on the line. Judith Conklin, are you our CIO in waiting? >> Yes. Hi. >> Can you talk a little about I.T. security? I know this is an area where you've done a lot of work over a long career. >> Thank you. Yes, I know we always talk about the standards and that we follow NIST but there are a lot of other things that we have put in place. For instance, we use CIS benchmarks and we can provide that information but also the CISO is on the phone, Shawn Lang -- on the panel, if he wants to add anything to what we use. I'm looking for him on the -- >> Hi, everyone. To elaborate on what Judith said and what was asked earlier, yes, we do agree following industry standards is something we do strive for. We use NIST as a basis for our security program, so that is used for the policies, procedures, things like that. As for the actual technology portion, we are a supporting member of CIS, the Center For Information Security. They generate standards for technologies. We also work with each of the technologies we leverage, their best practices, to assure that we are doing exactly the best possible protections for our internal data as well as the data that's entrusted to us to protect. >> Also, I'd like to add that we are currently working on if anyone here has heard of zero trust and implementing zero trust in our environment. We absolutely would include copyright data in our zero trust platform or initiative. >> Thank you, Judith. Keith has his hand up and has promised me a list of questions. One more thing before I hand off to you, we have a fairly small number of questions coming in from the public Q&A and I think that I'd like to treat the members of the group as delegates. If you have questions to bring up that you feel like the public would want to ask of either the agency or one of the panelists, that's great as well. >> While I do have a lot of questions, they're all related to one thing and probably can be answered all together. First on security since we were talking about that, there was talk about standards and whatever. I know in reading up on some of the reports and the testimony that there was a designated agency directory and was not compliant with the standard and the agency was working to make that happen. The goal was to fix that by the end of fiscal year 2020, so the question there is did that happen. Putting that aside also, look, if there's a vulnerability with regard to E deposits, like waiting six or eight months, is not a solution, whatever the end result is. That's very worrisome. That was one of my questions with regard to security. With regard to the safe framework, as you read through the materials and watch all the webinars and everything that have been over the several years, there's a little bit of jumping around in terms of, okay, as near as I can tell, there was no definitive date but it appears that the safe framework was implemented in October or November of 2020. But there's no mention of why move to the safe framework, what was being used before? Was it some other agile framework or God forbid some waterfall methodology which would be concerning. Was that a response to the OIG report, I think September of 2019, that talked about the need for an integrated master schedule or was there some other reason? I group all those questions together about safe. Lastly, registration, we talked about the fact that there's a user testing. of the prototype that's begun. I couldn't find much at all on that. It says it's going on but I have no idea how many people are testing, who they are. Is it a mix of big corporations and individual creators or a mix of different types of works, a mix of group registration and individual registration? Those are my three questions. Hopefully it's not overwhelming. >> I heard a question there about agile, a question about the registration prototype and how we're deciding who's testing it and can you repeat the third question one more time? >> The registration question or? The security question, not compliant at the time and I never saw anything else. >> Judith, why don't you go ahead with the first one. >> We have not implemented MSA yet on DMCA. We're working with copyright to do so. I believe that we did require or change the password length. We can get confirmation of that. Go ahead, Shawn. >> We did close all of the findings from the report in regards to information security to include the compliance with NIST and have ruled out MMA internally for all users. >> You asked a question, Keith, like sort of what were we doing before the move to scaled agile. This is a specific thing, we've got a few people on the call who can weigh in on the agency's evolution. Is Jim from OCIO on the call to talk about the evolution? >> He is not. Bill should be on the call. >> Bill, would you like to talk -- >> Or Mike. >> Bill just turned on his camera. >> We've been using agile scrum but also some projects using can ban for a number of years going back at least a decade. The reason that we have been adopting scaled agile framework is largely to coordinate the number of different streams of interrelated work that are required to deliver the copyright modernization. It increases collaboration between the stakeholder groups and copyright and OCIO and allows us to plan and prioritize in a way that meets copyright's business objectives, our contracting lead times, our need to coordinate different streams of technical resources. Since the program got bigger and bigger it became valuable to implement a much more formal planning and prioritization process which has been successful. We have a lot of experience doing large projects with agile, congress.gov, LOC.gov, projects like that using this technique and the continuous integration, continuous delivery techniques that we're also using for copyright. >> Thanks for that. I don't want anybody to get the impression I'm not supportive. I don't want to come across as combative or anything. In reading through the materials it was a big question on my mind. Thank you very much. >> Just to confirm, we have character requirements for DMCA. According to poorlysy. . >> Jeff, could you go next? >> I have one thing I want to bring up. We've been talking about privacy and -- actually two things. For claimants, especially for the independent creators, accessibility of their personal, identifiable information is very important and a certain level of privacy needs to be available in the new system at their option to protect them. That's a tradeoff between access to public information but they shouldn't have to give up their privacy to be able to register their works. Secondly, my question is not going to be on policy, I just need to know if on the road map for this new system if the office intends to make deposit copies available to the public. That would be a significant concern, accessibility through this system new to deposit copies for creators who have not yet published their work or who have participated in confidential promptings and want to register their works before the public has access, very important that their works not be accessible in the system. >> I'll touch on the privacy first, David. Obviously the copyright office will take the second. I was going to mention PIA, personally identifiable information -- PII, sorry. The zero trust, first of all, it is part of our security package and our implementation, PII is. We protect PII specifically. That is with the NIST now too. They added it several years ago, but also zero trust will help us do that in a very secure way. It's another layer of protecting that data. >> I would like for those who are in the call who are not aware that this is -- this would be a question of policy that would be handled by the usual policy engine of the agency so there would be no way, for example, to use the scaled agile framework. That has to be answered prior to going into a product backlog. The scaled agile framework is what we use to prioritize what we're doing next and our confidence gets higher so it's easy to mention, for example, the copyright public record system has a release next month and it's very easy for us to talk about it with high confidence because we have been looking at it on internal systems and as we go further out it's a little more difficult to know about specific dates or specific features. I will say they're very focused on the registration process currently and that's the -- I don't know if there's -- if any of the product owner or registration wants to weigh in on the specific features that are being prioritized currently. T.J., you can unmute and turn your camera on. >> Are we talking about in the current program increments? We work in three-month increments. I'd be happy to talk about what we're doing right now. Let me start with the most important thing. We have begun work on the external system. Up until now we were working with one team, working mostly on the internal side of the system. These are staff, examination functions, all these work flows that support the internal functions. The reason was so we could spend a little more time on user research, user testing and making sure we have good, high confidence in what we're going to start building on the external side. Starting last month, we actually onboarded a second team and we're doing it in tandem with this internal team where we work on the external side of the system. Specifically in starting that process, unfortunately there's a lot of not very interesting things I can share with the group in terms of -- there's a lot of infrastructure stuff we have to stand up and that kind of stuff. Last week we had a very crucial moment, hello world moment, where in the first three weeks of this external team starting we have seen the overall landing page and where these different questions, the application forum is going to flow. Again to say not much that we can show basically in images but a lot of work to stand us up. On the internal side we're focusing on building out the foundation for our correspondence system, referring to it as the message center, a model where we were sending subsidy emails to applicants which created problems in terms of not being able to connect the emails and replies and some of them would go to spam filters and Jung folders. Some of these different emails would not necessarily make it back to us in a timely process and cut down on the efficiency. We're moving to more of a doctor's office type model where I get a notification from my doctor's office via text, robocall, substantive email. Then I'm told you have a message waiting in the message center, and you log in and we correspond on the system in here. That's to say that during this PI we are standing up the internal side which will dovetail to the external side in future increments once we start working on that. We're continuing user research on the external components of the system so there's a component of that in each PI where we're looking ahead to all these different things. I heard a lot of talk about are we considering the standard application, considering the group application. The answer is absolutely yes. We're looking at all of those things during that user research phase which isn't necessarily part of a technical operation. We're working together to figure out some of these things to get ahead and figure out the answers to some of those questions before it becomes time to start to develop those things. The other things we're working on for the internal side are -- these are things that may not seem that important but we have to have an audit history so everything that happens to a case once it comes in, wants an application is received by the office and goes through the different steps, we need an audit trail. Then we're also working on some user permission type facets of the system. User permissions, setting up roles for different types of users and this is looking to automate some of the manual processes that we have right now in assigning work to individual examiners or to a particular division, setting up user access and preferences in a way that we'll be able to automate getting the right cases to the right people. All this speaks to the efficiency on our side. >> We have received a question from a member of the public that relates but is on the public record system about what will be included in release two. Sean, do you want to talk about that upcoming release? >> Before we move on, I had a question on the table. I didn't quite hear an answer. My question, settling aside policy, is public accessibility to deposit copies on the technical road map for your team, so we can understand as a committee whether or not we need to be providing suggestions or input on those particular features. >> Sorry, can you repeat the question one more time. Is what feature on the road map? >> My earlier question was, is public accessibility to deposit copies for copyright registrations on the road map for your team or not, setting aside policy. If it is on the road map, a lot of people on this committee are going to want to provide feedback and suggestions on those types of features. >> That again is a question that would have to go through a long rule-making process prior to being inserted into the road map. Does that make sense? That's not on the menu at this stage. >> That's all I was asking. That answers my question, thanks. >> That's not a policy commitment of one direction or another from the office. I'm not one of the attorneys in the office. I have an I.T. background but that is not currently in a backlog. I'm not supposed to say backlog anymore. We're trying to call that a product pipeline from now on because the word backlog is a bad word in the context of basically every federal bureaucracy. Jeff, did that answer your question? >> Absolutely, yes, thank you. >> Scott, I'm going to get to you but I want to hand over to Sean for a moment to talk about the upcoming release. >> Thanks. We're having our second release for the copyright public records system. We did have our first release in December of last year. We're trying to clean up the detailed record view as we come across the more interestingly recorded bits of data in the office and how those present in our new search index. We'll do searchability improvements, restructuring record views to make them more understandable, as well as a new feature to keep track of recent records and searches within a sessi If you run a search and want to rerun it later and you haven't logged out, you'll be able to rerun a recent search or go back and look at the recent records you may have viewed. >> Go ahead, Scott. >> I hope you'll allow me to ask a naive policy question because I think it has significant implications for implementation. Back to the thread about privacy and security, my question is, how clear are the policies around what information is by default public, what information is by default private, and where the decisions get made for any ambiguities in what is semipublic or semiprivate. There are clearly these very different user groups. There's an interested public, a set of researchers who are seeking access to large amounts of information and on the other side a legitimate group of content creators who are seeking privacy and security and how are those negotiated. >> I would say this is the area of personally identifiable information and privacy and security is a big one in federal bureaucracies. It covers policy in a wide array. I'll start by handing it over to Judith who has hopefully unmuted herself and who can start us off talking about the privacy aspects. >> At the Library of Congress, for every information system that we have, we identify a business owner. We call it an information system business owner and they make all those decisions on access to the data, what data can be screen, the categorization of the data. I will punt back to copyright office and the business part of it. >> That's a good dodge there, Judith. >> We will secure it in any manner that the business requires us to secure it. I will state that. >> Scott, the two big beginning parts of that process that we go through during the accreditation process for any I.T. system are the privacy threshold assessment and privacy impact assessment. Did I get those acronyms right, Judith? Those are subject to the agency-wide privacy office and we don't have those folks on the line today but that's one set of policies. Obviously the rule-making process is another set of policy that governs security on that side and additionally beyond all of that there's the actual I.T. security rules about the implementation of that. It's a big, complicated area. Is there a clarifying area that we could go? >> The purpose of the question in this case for the implementation side of things is how frictionless or frictionful that is either considered to be from policy, public or private. So the question here specifically is what goes into the decision-making process for the amount of friction that goes into access for data? Then my suggestion would be to make that as clear as possible to those users both on the side of content creators who have an interest in maintaining their privacy and o resear c >> Thanks. I think the clarity of the friction is a great comment and a great thing for us to take back. I think that's a big area that would be hard to get into in great depth in the time remaining. I'll take your comment in and move on to the next question. Susan, I think you were the next person with your hand up. >> Thank you. I wanted to ask a question about funding. I'm aware that a few years back -- and I've lost track of which year it was -- that congress appropriated I believe $12 million a year for five years for this project. I wanted to check in what year are we into that and are you all an is tis anticipating that those five $12 million allotments are going to cover the bulk of the current upgrade or will there need to be more funding and is there something copyright owners will need to advoc >> I think many of the people on the call have some familiarity with this part of the process. We requested five years of development funding as well as subsequent base funding for the ongoing modernization for this. Around $60 million over a five-year period. There are additional funds dedicated to the digitalization of the historic record which are separate funds and the office and agency have committed a portion of base funding to the effort. For example, you see the CIO and the deputy CIO on this, that's part of agency overhead which is also part of it. The most sensible public definition of done that we can pin to that gives an easy answer is the turning off of the legacy system, are we going to be ready to replace these legacy systems in 2024. That is still our goal. >> You feel like you have enough money to get to that goal right now with what you've been appropriated? >> That's a question that's largely -- the question to turn off the legacy systems, I would defer that question. I'm not the person to answer it and I don't think we have the person on the call. There's no known impediments to the plan. We feel like we're on target. Todd I believe was the next person asking a question. >> Call me a geek for procedures, in the last couple minutes that we have it seems like we spent three hours and dug into a tremendous amount and I think Keith dropped something in the chat as well. It seems like a meeting every six months is going to be insufficient for us to dig into these details at a level that I think is going to be valuable to the office. I would be willing to meet more often than that and I expect others in the group would as well. Do you have any sense of where w'l go It seems like only twice a year is not enough and are there ways in which assignments between now and next meeting, things that we can do to help? >> I want to say thank you for the energy and expertise of this group and thank you for the willingness to even come on this marathon. When we first started talking we weren't imagining that we would be still in the middle of a pandemic. It's not exactly as we mentioned it but this has been enormously valuable in terms of the visibility in the questions and answers and expertise. I appreciate the phenomenal energy. I'm seeing many comments in the chat that there would be more willingness for more input. I appreciate hearing that. I'm certainly not in a position to say off the cuff to that that I can change the agency's plan without further consultation. It's a great thing to know. Pamela. >> This does seem as though right now or in the current system there's three silos of information. Public records are used by three sets of people abdomen and if the outcome of the modernization puts all those together in one place, it naturally becomes an issue of whatever privacy controls were necessary for one silo will have to be rethought when all this data is accessible. Whether that data is stored separately is part of the answer to that so that's the classic more of an observation than a question. My practical question is, where do we go now? Are there minutes that will be provided after this conversation? What should we as committee members be prepared to do next? >> We're going to do one better than minutes. The full recording is available. Anybody who wants to refer back to the meeting doesn't have to rely on an individual's memory of what happened. The recording, and depending on the usefulness of the live transcript we've gotten, that may be included as well. I will say the only followup that we have currently scheduled from the committee, we came into this without full certainty of what would happen and what the level of engagement would be and how this would go. The only followup that we have planned already is the next meeting in six months. It would be in January of 2022. I'm hearing an appetite from the committee members for more. We're nearing the end of our time and I appreciate, again, the enormous effort that people have gone to to stay with this for three hours and I'm cognizant as well that we're still nearly 150 participants watching this group in a fish bowl. I have a couple of final -- I've got a big pile of sticky notes of the enormously helpful things that people in this group have been saying. In order to complete the time today, I would like to say that the commitment by the 13 members of the copyright public modernization committee, the staff of the copyright office, the staff of the office of the chief information officer to meet here today and share the information that we have together and to share the time we have together has been e I want to thank you for coming. We're going to conclude here in just the next couple of minutes. I wanted to also offer that there is -- the office actually has another event, another public event that's coming up this coming Monday. We hope that this is not -- when we think about the different ways that the copyright office hears from stakeholders and users and content creators, so the very next one that I'd like to talk about for just a brief minute is on Monday, July 26 at noon stand That webinar will deal specifically with the registration system that we've been talking about. These kinds of events, the webinar specifically is something that we do frequently and that are another opportunity to get -- display the work that we're doing and show what we're doing. I would hope to see in terms of assignments, I hope to see as many people as possible joining the office for the copyright office webinar which is Monday, July 26 at noon. I'm happy to send that out to the copyright public modernization committee as a reminder via email as well.