Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante released late last year the official version of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition, available on the Office’s website at http://copyright.gov/comp3/.

The Compendium serves as a technical manual for the Office’s staff, as well as a guidebook for authors, copyright licensees, practitioners, scholars, the courts, and members of the general public. More than three times the size of the previous edition, the Third Edition represents a comprehensive overhaul and makes the Office’s practices and standards more accessible and transparent to the public.

As in the past, it addresses fundamental principles of copyright law, such as creation, publication, registration, and renewal. It addresses routine questions such as who may file an application and who may request copies of the Office’s records. It describes recent changes to the Office’s recordation practices, such as the new option for submitting titles and registration numbers in electronic form. It also contains a new Table of Authorities that lists the cases, statutory provisions, and other legal authorities cited in the Third Edition and the relevant section where each citation may be found.

Check some of these nuggets found in the Compendium:

Although registration may be made at any time before a copyright expires or any time before bringing an infringement action in federal court, the U.S. Copyright Office strongly encourages copyright owners to submit their works for registration in a timely manner. As discussed in Section 202, a registration is a prerequisite for seeking statutory damages and attorney’s fees in an infringement action. To pursue these remedies, an unpublished work must be registered before the infringement occurs, while a published work must be registered within three months after publication or before the infringement occurs. See 17 U.S.C. § 412 .

. The U.S. Copyright Office has established an administrative procedure that allows an applicant to register a number of unpublished works with one application, one filing fee, and one set of deposit copies. This is known as the “unpublished collection” option. A registration issued under this option covers each work that is submitted for registration. It may also cover the compilation authorship (if any) involved in selecting the works and assembling them into a collective whole, provided that the applicant expressly claims that authorship in the application. See 37 C.F.R. § 202.3(b)(4)(i)(B). When no selection, coordination, or arrangement is claimed, the Office considers each work to be individually registered for purposes of statutory damages.

Many websites are frequently updated and may change significantly over time. A website may add content every hour, day, week, month, or year. To register a claim with the U.S. Copyright Office it is important to identify the specific version of the work(s) that will be included in the claim. As a general rule, each version of a work may be registered as a separate work if the version contains a sufficient amount of new, copyrightable authorship. See 17 U.S.C. § 101 (stating that “where the work has been prepared in different versions, each version constitutes a separate work”). A registration for a specific version of a work covers the new material that the author contributed to that version, including any copyrightable changes, revisions, additions, or other modifications that the author contributed to that version. But as discussed in Section 1008.2, the registration does not cover any unclaimable material that appears in that version, including any material that has been previously published or previously registered with the Office. Therefore, if the version contains an appreciable amount of content that has been previously published and/or previously registered, the applicant should exclude that material from the claim.

Example: • Sam Bavard operates a duck hunting website called “Animal Quackers.” Every three months Sam revises the website by adding new text and photographs. When Sam submits an application to register the latest version of the site he limits the claim to the “new text and photographs” that he added to the site, and he excludes the photographs and text that were previously registered with the Copyright Office.

There is much more helpful information in the Compendium. Check it out and refer to it often.