For complete details, visit https://law.uh.edu/ipil/falllecture.asp
Dave Fagundes
Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty Emory University Law School
Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty
Emory University Law School
Click here for Professor Fagundes's Emory faculty listing
Thursday, November 10, 2025 5:30 P.M. LIGHT RECEPTION 6:15 P.M. LECTURE, FOLLOWED BY HEAVY RECEPTION
The Houston Club 910 Louisiana, Suite 4900 – Houston
To RSVP or for further information, contact ipil@uh.edu or 713.743.2180
Copyright Administration by Accretion: 50 Years of the 1976 Copyright Act
One of the most overlooked ways that the 1976 Act transformed American copyright is how it changed the course of the Copyright Office as an administrative agency. In this Essay, we argue that the 1976 Act ushered in a form of administration that was not only new to copyright but rare among agencies generally: administration by accretion. We elaborate this descriptive claim and its implications in three steps. First, we detail how copyright administration has unfolded following the inflection point of the 1976 Act. The Act expanded the administrative duties of the Copyright Office but did so without providing a clear vision or practical infrastructure for effectuating those new responsibilities. Subsequent statutes have grafted further obligations onto the Office, also in a piecemeal manner. Second, we show how this distinctive expansion of the Office constitutes a phenomenon largely untheorized in agency governance that we call “administration by accretion.” Accretion reflects the serial addition—typically through separate statutes addressing separate policy problems—of functionally heterogeneous regulatory, adjudicatory, allocative, or advisory duties to an existing agency without a corresponding redesign of that agency’s mission, structure, procedures, expertise, political supervision, or resources. Finally, we touch on the benefits and drawbacks of administration by accretion as applied to the novel challenges faced by American copyright law in the next half-century of the 1976 Act regime.
