If the Office determines that the relevant requirements have not been met, the registration specialist will communicate with the applicant and explain why the works cannot be registered as a group and how the claim may be amended. The specialist may instruct the applicant to prepare a separate application, filing fee, and deposit for each work and submit them for registration on an individual basis, or the specialist may refuse to register the claim.
1104.4 The Scope of a Group Registration
A group registration covers the copyrightable authorship in each work that is submitted for registration.
With the exception of a group registration of databases, a group registration does not cover the selection and arrangement of the works, because the group itself is not a work of authorship. The group exists solely for the purpose of facilitating the registration of the individual works specified in the application. Although an applicant may exercise some judgment in selecting and combining the works within the group, these decisions do not constitute copyrightable authorship. Instead, the selection of works is based solely on the regulatory requirements for the relevant group registration option, and the combination of those works is merely an administrative accommodation that exists solely for the purposes of registration and the convenience of the applicant.
Ordinarily, the U.S. Copyright Office will not accept an application that attempts to register the group itself as a collective work or an application that asserts a compilation claim in the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of the works included within a group. However, there are two exceptions to this rule. As discussed in Section 1109.7(F), a registration for a group of serials covers the compilation authorship involved in creating each issue as a whole, and as discussed in Section 1117.7(B), an applicant must assert a compilation claim when seeking a group registration for the updates and revisions to an automated database.
1104.5 Group Registrations Distinguished from Registrations for Unpublished Collections
In determining whether to register multiple works with one application the applicant should consider the potential impact on the copyright owner's ability to seek damages in the event that a third party infringes those works.
When an applicant registers a number of works using the unpublished collection option, the claimant may assert a claim in the copyrightable selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of the collection as a whole. This may have significant consequences in a copyright infringement action. When a compilation claim has been asserted, the copyright owner may be entitled to claim only one award of statutory damages in an infringement action, even if the defendant infringed all of the works covered by the registration. See 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(1) (stating that a copyright owner may be entitled to recover "an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work" and "[fjor the purposes of this subsection, all the parts of a compilation or derivative work constitute one work"). That is not necessarily the case if the claimant does not explicitly assert a compilation claim. In such cases, the registration will extend to each individual work in the unpublished collection that is
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