1107.2 Eligibility Requirements
A group of serials may be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, provided that the following conditions have been met:
• Each issue in the group must be a serial as defined in Section 1107.1.
• The group must contain at least two issues.
• Each issue must be an all-new collective work that has not been previously published. These requirements are discussed in Sections 1107.2 (A) and 1107.2 (C) below.
• Each issue must be fixed and distributed as a discrete, self-contained collective work, as described in Section 1107.2 (D).
• Each issue must be a work made for hire.
• The author(s) and the copyright claimant(s) for each issue must be the same person or organization.
• The claim to copyright must be limited to the collective work, as discussed in Section 1107.2 (B).
• All of the issues must be published under the same continuing title.
• The serial generally must be published at intervals of a week or longer, such as a weekly or monthly publication.
• All of the issues must be published within a period of three months within the same calendar year (e.g., January 1st through March 31st, February 1st through April 30th, October 1st through December 31st, etc.), and the applicant must specify the date of publication for each issue in the group.
See 37 C.F.R. § 202.4 (D) (1) (I)-(v).
Serials that do not satisfy these requirements cannot be registered using this group registration option.
If the applicant is unable to register a particular issue using this group registration option, the applicant may submit a separate application for that issue using the online application for a “Single Serial Issue” or a paper application submitted on Form SE. For information concerning the procedures for registering a single issue of a serial publication, see Chapter 700, Section 712.