- Coordination authorship involved in classifying, categorizing, ordering, or grouping the material or data; and/or
- Arrangement authorship involved in organizing or moving the order, position, or placement of material or data within the compilation as a whole.
In determining whether a compilation satisfies the originality requirement, the registration specialist should focus on the manner in which the materials or data “have been selected, coordinated, and arranged” and “the principal focus should be on whether the selection, coordination, and arrangement are sufficiently original to merit protection.” Id. at 358.
The authorship involved in selecting, coordinating, and arranging the preexisting material or data must be objectively revealed in the deposit copy(ies). See id. (“Originality requires only that the author make the selection or arrangement independently … and that it display some minimal level of creativity) (emphasis added). For instance, a compilation of statistics is not copyrightable if the author’s selection, coordination, or arrangement of data is not evident in the claim.
While “[t]he originality requirement is not particularly stringent,” the Office cannot register a compilation “in which the selection, coordination, and arrangement are not sufficiently original to trigger copyright protection.” Id. The preexisting material or data do not need to “be presented in an innovative or surprising way.” See id. at 362. The Office may register the claim if the author’s selection possesses some minimal degree of creativity, even if the coordination and/or arrangement do not (or vice versa). However, the more creative the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement, the more likely it is that the author’s compilation will be registered. For example, the Office generally will not register a compilation consisting of all the elements from a particular set of data, because the selection is standard or obvious. Likewise, the Office generally will not register a compilation containing only two or three elements, because the selection is necessarily de minimis. See H.R. Rep. No. 94-1476, at 122 (1976), reprinted in U.S.C.C.A.N. at 5737 (stating that a work does not qualify as a collective work “where relatively few separate elements have been brought together,” as in the case of “a composition consisting of words and music, a work published with illustrations or front matter, or three one-act plays”).
In determining whether the author’s compilation is sufficiently original, the U.S. Copyright Office may consider the following factors:
- What type of material or data did the author compile?
- How is the material or data presented?
- Was the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement made from a large or diverse pool of material or data?
- Was the coordination or arrangement standard?
