Recently I was accepted as a beta tester for the new electronic copyright registration system at copyright.gov. I just tried out the Library of Congress's new online copyright registration and I'm unhappy to say I was not impressed at all. I think they are using a Siebel system and I loathe to think how much they spent on it.
General Problems
The opening page says that the online system can be used to submit registrations, but the only function I could find was for preregistration. Maybe its a typo or miscommunication.I tried using different browsers: DeerPark, Camino (both Firefox-ish), and even IE 7 on Windows XP, but they all looked the same and had the same problem.
Overly Complex
Got to hand it to Oracle / Siebel - they can overcomplicate things almost as well as Microsoft. From what I could garner from my cursory exploration of the new system, the online copyright registration server is using javascript function calls along with remote procedures - and not even ajax style, rather that having a logical url structure which aligns with the functional goals of the site - like user management, case tracking, and ecommerce for registration. Furthermore, they use frames! Ugh. I'm sure that Oracle explained to the Library of Congress how the web is stateless yada yada yada, and how they had to use their proprietary back-end session management system to handle the complex, multi-form data i/o required for copyright registration. Double-ugh.I'm probably being too harsh. The system is in beta, and they are still working on it.