- Finite Financial publishes The Final Word, which is a database that contains the closing price for securities that are traded on various exchanges. Finite selects the securities that are included within the database, organizes them into various categories, and arranges the closing price for each security in manner that facilitates searching and sorting of the information. Finite should be named as the author of the selection and coordination of the securities, as well as the author of the arrangement of the closing prices. Finite should not be named as the author of the actual prices that are listed in The Final Word, because they are mere facts that are not eligible for copyright protection.
613.8 Identifying the Author of a Collective Work or a Contribution to a Collective Work
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. Collective works are a subset of compilations. Id. (definition of “compilation”). Therefore, for the collective whole to be registrable, the separate and independent works must be selected, coordinated, and/or arranged in such a way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Id.
A contribution to a collective work is a separate and independent work that has been included within a collective work, such as an article that has been included within a periodical or an essay that has been included within an anthology. A collective work contains two different types of authorship:
- The authorship in the collective work as a whole, which involves selecting, coordinating, and/or arranging the various contributions to the collective work, and/or editing, annotating, and/or revising the contributions or the collective work as a whole; and
- The authorship in the separate and independent works that have been included in the collective work.
An applicant may register a collective work together with the separate and independent works contained therein if the collective work and the contributions were created by the same author and/or if the copyright in the collective work and the contributions are owned by the copyright claimant.
If the applicant intends to register the copyright in the collective work as a whole, the applicant should identify (i) the individual(s) or entity that selected, coordinated, and/or arranged the contributions and assembled them into a collective whole, and/or (ii) the individual(s) or entity that edited, annotated, and/or revised the contributions and/or the collective work as a whole.
If the applicant intends to register a collective work together with the contributions that appear in that work and if the contributions were created by a person(s) who
