The author of a compilation may claim copyright in an original selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of preexisting material, provided that the material has been used in a lawful manner. Section 103(a) of the Copyright Act states that the copyright in a compilation “does not extend to any part of the work” that “unlawfully” uses preexisting material. As discussed in Chapter 300, Section 313.6(B), this provision is intended to prevent “an infringer from benefiting, through copyright protection, from committing an unlawful act.” H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 57, reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 5671.
509 Collective Works and Contributions to Collective Works
This Section provides the definition and a general discussion of collective works and contributions to collective works. For information concerning the Office’s practices and procedures for evaluating the copyrightability of collective works, see Chapter 300, Section 312. For guidance in preparing an application to register a collective work or a contribution to a collective work, see Chapter 600, Sections 610.4, 613.8, 618.7, 620.8, and 621.8(D).
509.1 What Is a Collective Work?
A collective works is a type of compilation. The Copyright Act defines a collective work as “a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.” 17 U.S.C. § 101. The statute also states that “[t]he term ‘compilation’ includes collective works.” 17 U.S.C. § 101 (definition of “compilation”). Thus, collective works are subject to the statutory requirements for compilations.
Creating a collective work requires the “assemblage or gathering of ‘separate and independent works … into a collective whole.’” H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 120, reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. 5659, 5736; S. Rep. No. 94-473, at 104 (omission in original). In other words, collective works contain two distinct forms of authorship:
- The compilation authorship in creating the collective work, which involves selecting, coordinating, and/or arranging a number of separate and independent works and assembling them into a collective whole; and
- The authorship in the separate and independent works included within the collective work, such as an article that appears in a periodical issue or a poem that appears in an anthology.
Both forms of authorship may be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, provided that they contain a sufficient amount of original authorship and provided that the claimant owns the copyright in that material.
By definition, a collective work must contain “a number of contributions.” A work that contains “relatively few separate elements” does not satisfy this requirement, such as a work containing a single contribution, a composition that merely consists of words and music, a publication that merely combines a single work with illustrations or front matter, or a publication that merely contains three one-act plays. H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 122, reprinted in 1976 U.S.C.C.A.N. at 5737; S. Rep. No. 94-473, at 105.
