Congress assistant familiar with the situation told Wired that Blanche, Perkins and Nieves did not appear for work “because they have no jobs to appear.” The assistant continued: “As we have always supported, the president has no authority to appoint them. Robert Newlen has always been the acting librarian of the congress.”
If talks take place, they stay from a public point of view. But Perlmutter has some members of the congress openly from her side. “The president has no authority to remove the registration of copyright. That power lies only with the librarian of the congress.
In the meantime, the copyright office is in the odd position of trying to continue, as if it did not miss its head. Immediately after Perlmutter’s dismissal, the copyright office paused to broadcast registration certificates “due to abundance of caution,” according to USCO spokesman Lisa Berardi Markflak, who says the break impacted about 20,000 records. It resumed activities on May 29, but now sends registration certificates with an empty point, where it would usually be Perlmutter’s signature.
This unusual change has prompted discussion Among copyright experts on whether the records are now more Vulnerable to legal challenges. The copyright office maintains that they are valid: “There is no requirement that the registration signature must appear in registration certificates,” says Berardi Marflak.
In a motion related to Perlmutter’s process, however, she states This sending of the records without signature opens them to “challenges in litigation”, something outside copyright experts also pointed out. “It is true that the law does not explicitly require a signature,” IP lawyer Rachael Dickson says. “However, the law really explicitly says it is the copyright registry determining whether the material sent for the application is a copyright theme.”
Without anyone acting as a registry, Dickson thinks it would be reasonable to argue that the legal requirements are not met. “If you completely take them out of the equation, you have a really big problem,” she says. “Litters who try to challenge the validity of copyright registration will jump about this.”
Perlmutter’s lawyers argued that leaving the copyright office without an active leader will cause failure beyond the registration certificate, as the registry performs various tasks, from the Congress on Copyright Congress to the Recented organizations such as the Mechanical License -Collective, the nonprofit for managing rules for stretching and downloading music. Because MLC’s certificate so far, Perlmutter would usually go ahead with the organization’s recede; As her complaint notices, now, the process of recertification does not move forward.
The MLC may not be as affected by Perlmutter’s absence as the complaint suggests. A source close to the MLC told Wired that the organization should indeed be preserved, but that the law does not require the acceptance process to be completed in a specific time frame, so it will be able to continue to function as usual.
