Application to register a work created by an individual author who transferred his or her copyright to another party. Thus, there is no need to request "a brief statement of how the claimant obtained ownership of the copyright" in this type of application.
Section 408(c)(1) of the Copyright Act authorizes the Register to establish an administrative procedure for registering a group of related of works. Section 408(d) authorizes the Register to establish a procedure for issuing a supplementary registration to correct an error in an existing registration or to amplify the information given in an existing registration. Congress gave the Register the discretion to develop an appropriate application for these types of registrations. See 17 U.S.C. § 408(c)(1), (d). The application requirements for the various group registration options that the U.S. Copyright Office currently offers are discussed in Chapter 1100, while the application requirements for a supplementary registration are discussed in Chapter 1800.
1402.3 Registration Type Governs Which Application to Use
The U.S. Copyright Office currently offers the types of applications described below. An applicant should choose an application based on whether he or she is seeking a basic registration, a group registration, a supplementary registration, a renewal registration, or a GATT registration. For a definition and discussion of each type of registration, see Chapter 200, Section 202.1.
An application for a basic registration covers a work of authorship created or
first published on or after January 1, 1978. This type of registration may be obtained
with one of the following types of applications:
• Standard Applications. This type of application may be used to register the following types of works:
- A single work.
- Multiple unpublished works, provided that (i) the elements are assembled in an orderly form, (ii) the combined elements bear a single title identifying the collection as a whole, (iii) the copyright claimant in all the elements and in the collection as a whole is the same, and (iv) all the elements are by the same author or, if they are by different authors, at least one of the authors has contributed copyrightable authorship to each element. For guidance in completing an application to register an unpublished collection, see Chapter 1100, Section 1106.3.
- Multiple published works, provided that (i) they are owned by the same person or organization, and (ii) they are physically bundled together for distribution to the public as a single, integrated unit, and they are first published in that integrated unit. This is known as the "unit of publication" option. For a definition of a "unit of publication" and a detailed discussion of this option,
see Chapter 1100, Section 1107.4.
• Single Application. This type of application may be used to register a single work [e.g., one poem, one song, one photograph) created by one individual, provided that
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