1110.7 (E) Identifying the Copyright Claimant
To register a group of contributions to periodicals, the applicant should provide the name and address of the copyright claimant. See 17 U.S.C. § 409 (1). As discussed in Section 1110.2, the claimant for all the contributions must be the same person or organization.
For purposes of copyright registration, the claimant must be (I) the author of the contributions, or (ii) the person or organization that owns all of the rights under copyright that initially belonged to the author. See 37 C.F.R. § 202.3 (A) (3). No other party is entitled to be named as a copyright claimant.
When naming the author as the copyright claimant, the applicant should provide the author’s full name and address in the field marked Individual Claimant. However, if the applicant stated “Anonymous” or provided the author’s pseudonym in the First Name/Last Name fields on the Author screen, the applicant should provide this same information in the corresponding fields on the Claimants screen.
The applicant may name the person or organization that owns all of the rights that initially belonged to the author, but only if that party owns the copyright in all the contributions. If the claimant is an individual, the applicant should provide the claimant’s full name and address in the field marked Individual Claimant. If the claimant is a legal entity, the applicant should provide this information in the field marked Organization.
If the author and the claimant are not the same person, the applicant should provide a brief statement that explains how the claimant obtained the copyright in the contributions. The applicant should provide this information by selecting one of the statements listed in the drop down menu marked Transfer Statement. If these statements do not fully describe the transfer, the applicant may provide a more specific statement in the field marked Transfer Statement Other. Currently, the total amount of text that may be provided in this field is limited to 100 characters.
For additional guidance on completing the claimant fields, see Chapter 600, Section
619.12. For guidance on completing the transfer fields, see Chapter 600, Section 620.9.