Newspapers

For registration purposes, a “newspaper” is defined as a serial designed mainly to be a primary source of information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope. Newspapers contain a broad range of news on all subjects.

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

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

• The newspaper 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.

• The claim must include all issue dates within one calendar month.

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

• One positive 35-mm. silver-halide microfilm that includes all issues within the calendar month must be deposited. Final editions are required when two or more daily editions are published. In some cases, the publisher may be exempted from sending the microfilm by the Copyright Acquisitions Division of the Copyright Office. The Copyright Acquisitions Division will notify the publisher if a newspaper is exempted. For an exempted newspaper, an optional deposit may accompany the application. This deposit should consist of: (1) complete print copies of the first and last issues of the month, or (2) print copies of the first section of the first and last issues of the month, or (3) print copies of the first page of the first and last issues of the month.

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

---

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.”

---

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.

---

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.

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.

Examples: John Smith (author) doing business as Smith Publishing Company Sue Jones (author) trading as Jones Productions

---