collective work will only be eligible for one award of statutory damages no matter how many discrete works within the website may be infringed. 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(1). For information concerning the registration options for collective works and contributions to collective works, see Chapter 500, Section 509.
If the applicant determines that a website is unpublished, it may be possible to register the works that appear on site as an unpublished collection, such as an unpublished collection of photographs, an unpublished collection of articles, or an unpublished collection of blog posts. In other cases, it may be possible to register a number of works with one application by using one of the group registration options, such as the option for registering a group of published photographs or a group of contributions to periodicals, provided that the applicant satisfies the eligibility criteria for that option. For information concerning these registration options, see Chapter 1100 (Registration for Multiple Works).
1008.5 Identifying the Specific Version That May Be Included in the Claim
Many websites are frequently updated and may change significantly over time. A website may add content every hour, day, week, month, or year. To register a claim with the U.S. Copyright Office it is important to identify the specific version of the work(s) that will be included in the claim.
As a general rule, each version of a work may be registered as a separate work if the version contains a sufficient amount of new, copyrightable authorship. See 17 U.S.C. § 101 (stating that "where the work has been prepared in different versions, each version constitutes a separate work"). A registration for a specific version of a work covers the new material that the author contributed to that version, including any copyrightable changes, revisions, additions, or other modifications that the author contributed to that version. But as discussed in Section 1008.2, the registration does not cover any unclaimable material that appears in that version, including any material that has been previously published or previously registered with the Office. Therefore, if the version contains an appreciable amount of content that has been previously published and/or previously registered, the applicant should exclude that material from the claim.
Example:
• Sam Bavard operates a duck hunting website called "Animal
Quackers." Every three months Sam revises the website by adding new text and photographs. When Sam submits an application to register the latest version of the site he limits the claim to the "new text and photographs" that he added to the site, and he excludes the photographs and text that were previously registered with the Copyright Office.
For information concerning the procedure for excluding unclaimable material, see Section 1009.8. For a general discussion of issues involving the registration of different versions of a work, see Chapter 500, Section 512.
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