Today we celebrate the forty-sixth anniversary of Barbara Ringer’s appointment as the first female Register of Copyrights. While her tenure was long before my time in the Copyright Office, I’m in awe of her dedication to intellectual property law and especially to equality and diversity in the workplace.
Ringer earned her law degree and joined the Office in 1949 as an examiner. She moved through the ranks to lead the Examining Division and then become Assistant Register of Copyrights in 1966. Through much of that time, she worked as the principal architect of the 1976 Copyright Act, which was the first major revision to copyright law since 1909. Once President Ford signed the Copyright Act into law, Ringer led the effort to implement the sweeping changes.