If you haven’t been keeping up with your copyright registrations – or if you’ve never registered your stuff at all – you may have a sizable back catalogue of content to protect. Or maybe you create new content all the time, and are trying to figure out how to register it without going broke on fees. Either way, a common question is whether you can register multiple works on the same registration form, to save time, money or both.
Unfortunately, the default answer from the Copyright Office is that every creative work should be separately registered. However, there are several exceptions that allow you to register a group of certain types of works on a single application, particularly if you’re a musician or a photographer.
THE KEY QUESTIONS
In order to figure out if you can take advantage of these exceptions, there are a few important questions you need to answer about the works you’d like to register:
First, are any of the works published? The term “published” has a special meaning in copyright law, which essentially boils down to whether copies of the work were distributed to the public. Public display of a work doesn’t count, so showing your work at a gallery, for example, would not move it to the published category, unless you also sold or handed out copies. What about posting your work on the Internet, you ask? Good question, and the Copyright Office won’t really answer it for you. If you actually encourage people to download copies (for example, by including a way to download a PDF or a music file), then you’re probably publishing the work. But if you’re just posting a photograph, a blog post or a video on a website or social media, then the Copyright Office takes the position that you get to decide if you published it.
The main advantage of calling a work “unpublished” is that several group registration options are only available for unpublished works. But there is one, specific situation where you may want to call it published, even if it means filing multiple applications – if you posted the work less than three months ago and someone is already copying it. By law, if you register a work within three months of publication, you still get attorneys’ fees and statutory damages for any infringement. But unpublished works only get those benefits for infringements that occur after registration (this is one reason why copyright attorneys encourage artists to do copyright registrations at least every three months).
Second, if the works were published, when where they published? This matters because some registration options are only available for groups of works that were published together, or within a certain time period.
Third, who is the author of each work? The “author” is the person who actually created it, i.e. who wrote it, painted it, or took the photo. If it was created as a work for hire, the author is the employer. The author matters because some group options are only available if all of the works have the same author.
Fourth, who is the copyright “claimant” of each work – the current owner of the copyright? This will be the same as the author unless the author gave his or her rights to another party (such as a publisher or a hold-out company). Like the author, the claimant matters because most group applications only cover works with the same claimant.
Depending on your answers to these questions, you may have several options for registering a group of works at once (and paying only one fee):
OPTION #1 – GROUP REGISTRATION
For unpublished works, the easiest option is probably going to be the Copyright Office’s group registration application. Using this option, you can register a group of works on a single application, without many of the restrictions of the other options. Unfortunately, the Copyright Office now limits you to a maximum of ten works per application (except for photographs – that limit is 750). This may not offer a lot of solace if you need to register hundreds of works, and it’s of no help if you’ve been selling or distributing your items (again, the registration only covers unpublished works). In addition, all of the works must have the same author, same copyright owner, and must be in the same copyright class (literary works, visual art, sound recordings or performing arts).
There is an exception to this last requirement for musicians – you can register up to ten sound recordings and the musical compositions for those songs on the same application, as long as all ten songs are on the same album and the copyright owner for everything is the same. This won’t work if the compositions and sound recordings are owned by different parties, but if you’re self-releasing your work, this option lets you do a whole album in one fell swoop.
OPTION #2 – COLLECTIVE WORKS
If you have significantly more than 10 unpublished works, you may be able to combine some of them as a “collective work.” This type of registration applies to art that is combined in a new, creative way, such as an anthology, or a mix-tape. The registration is intended to protect the creativity in the selection and arrangement of the pieces, not the pieces themselves. However, the registration does cover the individual works if the individual and collective works all have the same owner, none of the individual works were ever published or registered, and the individual works are not already in the public domain.
Preparing a collective work registration is not as simple as the group registration, because the collective work itself has to be creative – if you just slap twenty unrelated pieces together in alphabetical order and call it good enough, the Copyright Office may reject the application. Collective work registrations also have another downside – the entire collection is considered a single work for statutory damages purposes. Statutory damages are essentially penalty awards that you can receive if you later win a copyright infringement lawsuit against a copycat. Normally, you’re entitled to a separate award for every work that was copied, so if someone copies twenty of your short stories, you get twenty statutory damages awards (at between $750 and $30,000 per). But if you combined those twenty short stories in a single collective work registration to save filing fees, you get just one award, not twenty.
OPTION #3 – SINGLE UNIT
This registration option is available if you physically distribute some of your pieces together, regardless of whether they are published or unpublished. For example, a box of mixed greeting cards, a matched jewelry set, or a CD that also has original album work and liner notes. Again, the copyright claimant for each individual component needs to be the same, and if the works were ever published, they must have been first published together, at the same time — if you combine new works with older works, the application may be rejected. Also, unlike collective works, this registration only applies to items that are physically distributed (no digital distribution) to the public.
OPTION #4 – PHOTOGRAPHS
The Copyright Office allows photographers to register larger groups of their works at once, though there is still a hard cap — 750 photos on a single application, published or unpublished (and you can’t mix published and unpublished photos on the same application). All of the photographs on the application need to have the same author and the same claimant, and the registration only covers photos, so you can’t include captions, artwork, etc. If the photos were published, you can only include ones that were published in the same calendar year on the same application.
OPTION #5 – SERIALS, NEWSPAPERS, NEWSLETTERS AND PERIODICAL
Finally, the Copyright Office still provides registration options for several more traditional “group” works, such as newspapers and magazines. These probably won’t be useful to the average small business or individual artist, but if you’re putting out one of these forms of media and want to make sure your work is protected, you still can.
BOTTOM LINE - HAVE A PLAN FOR REGISTERING YOUR WORKS, EVEN IF YOU WAIT TO ACTUALLY REGISTER THEM
As you can see, once you’ve started to sell your works to the public, your options for registering them become more limited. So it’s a good idea to make a plan for how you will register the works, even if you decide you’re going to wait to actually pull the trigger on the registrations for now. Registering the works before they’re published gives you the most options, but it’s certainly not necessary in every case, and even something as small as releasing items in bunches on the same date can give you more flexibility and potentially save you significant money in registration fees in the long term.