Newsletter

For registration purposes, a daily newsletter is defined as a serial published and distributed by mail or electronic media at least two times a week. Newsletters must contain news or information of interest chiefly to a special group (for example, trade and professional associations, corporations, schools, colleges, and churches). Newsletters are customarily available by subscription and are not sold on newsstands.

Newsletter issues may be registered as a group if they meet all of the following requirements:

• The newsletter must be a daily newsletter as defined above.

• The newsletter must be a “work made for hire” that is, the employer is the author.

• The author (employer-for-hire) must also be the copyright claimant.

• Each issue must be an essentially all-new collective work or all-new issue that has not been published before.

• The claim must include two or more issues within a single calendar month.

• The application must be submitted no later than three months after the last publication date included in the group.

• One complete copy of each issue included in the group must be deposited. If the newsletter is published only online, one complete print-out of each issue, or a computer disk (or CD-ROM) containing all the issues and a print-out of the first and last issues included in the group, must be sent.

Note: Additional material must be sent only if specifically requested by the Copyright Acquisitions Division. The request will specify the nature of the additional material required, which will be either (I) one positive 35-rnrn. silver-halide microfilm that includes all issues within the calendar month, or (2) one or two complimentary subscriptions for the Library of Congress.

Important: The microfilm or subscriptions must be sent to the address specified in the request from the Copyright Acquisitions Division. Unless expressly requested, no microfilm or subscription copies are required.

If all of these requirements are not met, each newsletter issue must be registered separately.

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Number of Issues in This Group

Enter the number of days within the month in which publication occurred, regardless of the number of issues published per day. For example, if the month had 30 days and an issue appeared each day, enter “30.” If two issues were published daily, you should still enter “30.”

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Work Made for Hire

A work made for hire is either

• a work created by an employee as part of his/her regular duties. Courts have considered certain factors in the employment relationship, such as whether taxes are withheld or benefits given, to determine whether the contributor is an “employee” under this sense of the definition. See Circular 9.

or

• a specially commissioned work for certain categories of works and only if there is a written agreement between the employer and employee stating that the work is made for hire. Specially commissioned works must fall into one of the following categories:
  
  
  1. contribution to a collective work
  2. part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work
  3. translation
  4. supplementary work
  5. compilation
  6. instructional text
  7. test or answer material for a test
  8. atlas

If a work is made for hire, the employer is the author. See “statutory definition” below.

Statutory definition A work made for hire is defined as: A work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment, or A work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. A supplementary work is defined as a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendices and indexes.

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Doing Business As

You may give the name under which an author does business as long as the two names represent one and the same entity. The relationship may also be expressed as “trading as,” “sole owner of,” “also known as,” and “acceptable alternative designation.” Where an individual is doing business as an unincorporated organization, the organization is not a separate legal entity. Certain types of organizations such as corporations and partnerships, however, are separate legal entities and should not be listed here.

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Basis of Claim

Check the appropriate box(es) to describe the material in which copyright is claimed. The registration of a group of newsletters includes all the material in which the claimant owns the copyright. This includes the authorship of compiling and editing each issue, as well as the content of any contributions (e.g., text or photos) done by employees of the claimant as "works made for hire." In addition, it includes any independently authored contributions (not done by employees) in which all rights have been transferred to the claimant by the contributors. These other contributions are included even though the individual contributors are not named as authors on the application.

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Editing consists of adding, revising, and/or deleting preexisting text.

Compilation is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. To be copyrightable, a compilation must contain at least a certain amount of original selection and/or ordering. For example, the selection of only 3 poems from different authors would not constitute a copyrightable compilation.

Text may include works that contain a series of words or phrases, usually forming complete sentences that explain or narrate, such as poems, stories, scripts and instructions.

Other may be used to briefly state (in general terms) authorship that is not covered by the boxes provided and for which you seek this registration.

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Collective Works

The phrase “collective work” refers to a work, such as a serial issue, in which a number of contributions are assembled into a collective whole. There are two types of authorship in a collective work:

• Authorship of the collective work as a whole, which may include revisions, editing, compilation, and similar authorship that went into putting the work into final form, and
• Authorship of the individual contributions.

When the two types of authorship are owned separately, they cannot be registered together on a single application. Each application requires a separate fee.

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