A certified copy of a birth registration may also be referred to as a long-form birth certificate copy. This is the only type of birth certificate copy that is legal for official use. You can only get long-form copies from a Vital Records Office in your birth state, where the original birth certificate is always kept on file.
Long-form birth certificate copies are exact copies of the original document and contain all of the same information instead of a short-form copy, which only includes certain limited information.