The regulation establishing this option became effective on January 7, 1991. Serials published before that date are not eligible for group registration.
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. As discussed above, each issue in the group must be an essentially all-new collective work that has been published for the first time. In other words, the issues included in the group cannot be derivative versions of a previously published issue or a serial that is frequently modified, updated, or adapted, such as a website.
By definition, a collective work contains two distinct forms of authorship:
• The compilation authorship in creating the serial, which involves selecting, coordinating, and 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 serial, such as an article or photograph.
Both forms of authorship may be registered using the group registration option for serials, provided that (i) the contributions and the collective work as a whole were created by the author named in the application, and (ii) the author and the claimant are the same [i.e., the author owns the copyright in that material).
A group registration only covers material created and owned by the author/claimant named in the application. It does not cover material created by authors who are not named in the application or contributions that are not owned by the copyright claimant. In particular, the Office will not accept an application that purports to register articles, photographs, or other contributions created by a person who transferred the copyright in his or her work to the author/claimant.
As discussed above, the group must contain at least two issues and all of the issues must be published within a three-month period during the same calendar year, but otherwise there is no limit on the number of issues that may be included within each group.
If the applicant is unable to register a particular issue using the group registration option for serials, the applicant may submit a separate application for that issue using the online application or a paper application submitted on Form SE. For information concerning the procedures for registering a single issue of a serial publication, see Chapter 700, Section 712.
1109.3 Application Requirements
A group of serials may be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office by submitting an online application through the Office's electronic registration system. In the alternative, the applicant may submit a paper application using Form SE/Group. See 37 C.F.R. § 202.3(b)(6)(v).
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12/22/2014
