Ninth Circuit Decision Allows for Enhanced, Cost-Effective Website Protection

Generally, copyrightable works must be registered with the US Copyright Office individually. For each work, the registrant must fill out an application and submit a fee ranging from $35 to $85. This practice is time consuming and can be expensive, depending on the number of works registered. The Ninth Circuit recently issued an opinion altering this requirement as it relates to registration of collective works, requiring only a single registration to protect each individual work. In Alaska Stock v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co., the Ninth Circuit held a registration for a collective work covers the component works also owned by the applicant even if the applicant did not list the title and author of each individual component work. In other words, a copyright owner can acquire one copyright registration covering a massive quantity of works rather than submitting separate applications (each requiring a fee) by applying for a copyright in a compilation. In Alaska Stock, a stock photography agency, Alaska Stock, registered automated databases each containing between 500 and 6,000 separate photographs from many different photographers. The Copyright Office issued one certificate for each of the collections, which purportedly covered the collection and the individual photographs. Alaska Stock licensed photographs covered by these registrations to major publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (“HMH”) for a limited number of publications. After Alaska Stock discovered HMH allegedly published more photographs than permitted, it filed suit for copyright infringement. On appeal, the Ninth Circuit reversed the lower court’s decision and upheld the Copyright Office’s longstanding practice to permit the collective work registration to cover the underlying individual photographs.

Source: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/03/18/10-36010.pdf

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