1108.2 Eligibility Requirements
A group of newspaper issues 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 newspaper, as defined in Section 1108.1.
• Each issue must be an all-new collective work that has not been published before (except in cases where earlier editions of the same issue are submitted together with the final edition). These requirements are discussed in Sections 1108.2 (A) and 1108.2 (C) below.
• Each issue must be fixed and distributed as a discrete, self-contained collective work, as described in Section 1108.2 (D).
• The claim in each issue must be limited to the collective work, as discussed in Section 1108.2 (B).
• Each issue must be a work made for hire, and the author and claimant for each issue must be the same person or organization.
• All the issues must be published under the same continuing title.
• All the issues must be published within the same calendar month and they must bear issue dates within that month.
• The applicant must identify the earliest and latest date that the issues were published.
See 37 C.F.R. § 202.4 (E) (1)- (4).
Newspapers that do not satisfy these requirements cannot be registered using this group registration option. See Group Registration of Newspapers, 82 Fed. Reg. 51,369, 51,371 (Nov. 6, 2017).
If the applicant is unable to register a particular issue with this 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 712.2.