Help: Updates to a News Website | U.S. Copyright Office

Help: Group Registration of Updates to a News Website

Eligibility Requirements

A group of published updates to a news website (“GRNW”) may be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office with one application and one filing fee if the following conditions have been met:

Each update must be made to a news website, as defined in 37 C.F.R. § 202.4(m).
The group must include at least two updates published on the same news website.
Each update must be a collective work that has not been published before, and the claim in each update must be limited to the collective work.
Each update must be a work made for hire.
The author and claimant for each update must be the same person or organization.
All of the updates must be published within the same calendar month (for example, March 1–March 31), and the applicant must identify the earliest and latest dates on which the updates were published during that month.

To register a group of published updates to a news website, you must submit identifying material for each eligible update. The identifying material should show a complete copy of the home page for the website as it existed at a specific point on each day that an eligible update was published to the website. If a complete copy is technically unfeasible due to the size or continuous nature of the home page, you may submit the first twenty-five pages of the home page that demonstrates updates from the previous deposit copy. Each update must be submitted in a separate PDF file, and the files must be uploaded to the electronic registration system. Physical deposits will not be accepted. Learn more about the deposit requirements.

News website updates that do not satisfy these requirements cannot be registered using this group registration option. If the Office determines that your submission does not qualify for the GRNW option, your application may be refused. If your works do not satisfy these requirements or if you are unsure if they are eligible for this option, you should return to the Home screen within the electronic registration system and select a different option.

All Works Must Be Published Updates to the Same News Website

You may use this option to register a group of published updates to a news website. This option cannot be used to register any other type of work.

For purposes of registration, a “news website” is a web page or set of interconnected web pages that meet the following requirements:

Designed to be a primary source of written information on current events, either local, national, or international in scope, that contains a broad range of news on all subjects and activities and is not limited to any specific subject matter
Accessed using a uniform resource locator (URL) organized under one particular primary domain name

For example, copyright.gov is the primary domain name/URL for the Copyright Office’s website. Any webpage that includes this domain name, such as https://www.copyright.gov/registration/grnw, would be considered part of the Copyright Office’s website. By contrast, pages with the primary domain name/URL beginning with loc.gov would be considered a different website, even though the Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress, and even though copyright.gov and loc.gov are linked to each other, stored on the same servers, and originate from the same agency.

For purposes of registration, an “update” is any change to the news website that results in or reflects sufficiently creative collective work authorship. A collective work will be eligible for this registration option if it was first published on a publicly accessible website, including news websites protected by paywalls.

Each Update Must Be A Collective Work

A news website update will be considered a collective work if the update contains a number of contributions constituting separate and independent works in themselves that are assembled into a collective whole.

Collective works typically contain two types of authorship:

The compilation authorship involved in creating the website update, including the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of the separate contributions
The authorship in the separate and independent contributions that have been included within the update, such as articles, photographs, and illustrations

The registration will cover all updates to the news website that resulted in sufficiently creative collective work authorship. Each update will be registered as a separate collective work for purposes of section 504(c)(1) of Title 17 of the United State Code.

A news website update may qualify as a collective work if it contains sufficiently creative compilation authorship. In other words, there must be new expression in the selection, coordination, and/or arrangement of the articles, photographs, or other content appearing in each update. Whether the content itself is entirely new is irrelevant to this determination. For example, an update could be considered an original collective work if it contains a new selection, coordination, or arrangement of content, even if that content has been previously published on the website—such as articles appearing in previous updates.

The registration may cover the separate and independent contributions that appear within the update (such as articles, photographs, illustrations, etc.) if (1) the claimant fully owns the copyright in both the collective work compilation and the contributions on the date the claim is filed, and (2) the contributions have not been previously published or registered. Note: The Copyright Office will only examine the updates for new collective work authorship. It will not examine any of the individual contributions for copyrightable authorship, nor will the Office determine if any of them are owned by the copyright claimant.

All Updates Must Be Published in the Same Calendar Month

All updates in the group must be published, and all their publication dates must be within the same calendar month (for example, March 1–March 31). Additionally, the applicant must identify the earliest and latest dates on which the updates were published during that month.

This group registration option cannot be used to register unpublished updates or updates published in different calendar months.

Title of the News Website

On the Title screen, you must provide the news website’s primary domain name/URL in the Title or URL of News Website field and identify the month and year that the updates were published on that website. The primary domain name/URL of the news website should include the top-level domain (.com, .org, .net), but not the standard internet prefixes “http://www.” or “https://www.”

Examples:

http://www.grgazette.michigannews should be entered as “grgazette.michigannews”
https://www.washingtonchronicle.com should be entered as “washingtonchronicle.com”

A title for the group of news website updates will be created automatically by the electronic registration system and will be used to identify the registration in the Office’s online public record. The group title will include the primary domain name/URL and the publication dates provided in the application.

For example, if you list the primary domain name/URL as “grgazette.michigannews” and state that the earliest update in the group was published on March 1, 2024, and the most recent one was published on March 31, 2024, the system will generate the following group title:

grgazette.michigannews. [Published: 2024-03-01 to 2024-03-31. Updates: March 2024]

You may not include titles for the individual articles or other contributions appearing on the website within the application itself. If you would like to add title information for the individual contributions to the registration record, you may upload a cover letter or other document. The Copyright Office will not review this information or add it to the application, the certificate of registration, or the public record for this claim. However, the document will be maintained as part of the Office’s internal registration records.

Month/Year

Identify the month and year that the updates were published on the news website. This information should be provided in “MM/YYYY” format. For example, if the updates were published in August 2024, you should enter “08/2024.”

Publication

Publication occurs when updates to a news website are distributed to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. Offering to distribute copies to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication. A public performance or public display of a work does not, in and of itself, constitute publication.

The option for registering a group of news website updates is only available for published updates. The copyright claimant, or their authorized agent, must determine whether the news website updates included in the group are published. The electronic registration system automatically adds a statement indicating the updates have been published on the dates specified by the applicant. Because the applicant must certify the information given in the application is true and correct, the applicant should ensure that all updates in the group are published works and that they were published on the dates specified in the application.

If the updates to the news website are unpublished, they are not eligible for registration using the GRNW option. You should return to the Home screen within the electronic registration system and select a different registration option. At this time, the only option for registering an unpublished collective work is the Standard Application; if the updates to the news website are unpublished, you may submit a separate Standard Application, deposit, and fee for each unpublished update.

For more information concerning online publication, see Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition, section 1008.3.

Publication Dates for the Updates in the Group

The news website updates must be published in the same calendar month, and the applicant must provide the date of publication (month, day, and year) for the first (oldest) and last (newest/most recent) updates in the group. This information should be entered in the spaces provided on the Publication screen.

For example, if the updates were published between October 1, 2022, and October 31, 2022, you would enter 10/01/2022 in the Publication Date of First Update in this Group [mm/dd/yyyy] field and 10/31/2022 in the Publication Date of Last Update in this Group [mm/dd/yyyy] field.

Nation of Publication

On the Publication screen, you must identify the nation where the updates were published for the first time. To do so, select the name of the appropriate country from the drop-down menu.

For more information concerning the nation of publication for website content, see Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition, section 1009.4(B).

Number of Days of Updates

You must upload identifying material that shows the sufficiently creative collective work authorship in the updates submitted for registration, and as discussed above, updates must be published within the same calendar month. On the Publication screen, select a number between 2 and 31 to identify the number of calendar days’ worth of updates you plan to submit.

If publication of updates to the news website occurs more than once per day, you need only submit identifying material for one update published on that day.

Author/Claimant

The author and the copyright claimant for each update must be the same person or organization, and each update must have been created as a “work made for hire.”

A work made for hire is either

a work created by an employee within the scope of his or her employment;

a work that is specially ordered or commissioned, provided that the parties expressly agree in a signed, written agreement that the work is considered a “work made for hire,” and the work is specially ordered or commissioned for use as
- a compilation;
- a contribution to a collective work;
- a translation;
- instructional text, which is defined as a “literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities”; or
- a supplementary work, which 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, appendixes, and indexes.”

For more information on works made for hire, see Circular 30.

The author of a work made for hire is either

the employer of the person(s) who created the updates, or
the party that specially ordered or commissioned the updates.

On the Author/Claimant screen, you should enter either the name of the organization or the name of the individual who employed the person(s) who created the updates or who specially ordered or commissioned the updates. If the employer or commissioning party is an organization, provide that entity’s name in the Organization Name field and provide the entity’s complete address. If the employer or commissioning party is an individual, provide that individual’s full name in the Individual Employer field and provide the individual’s complete address.

Examples:

John Smith is an employee of the Denver Times. As part of his normal duties, John creates and publishes updates to the Denver Times’s website. The Denver Times should be named as the author of these updates, not John Smith.
The Nacogdoches Press commissioned another company, News Writers, LLC, to create and publish updates to its news website; the contract with News Writers, LLC specifies that the updates are “works made for hire.” Nacogdoches Press should be named as the author of the news website updates, not News Writers, LLC or its employees.

Author/Claimant's Contributions to the Updates

Because each update must be a collective work, the system will automatically describe the author/claimant's contribution as “Collective Work Authorship.”

A claim in the collective work authorship covers the compilation authorship involved in creating each update. If any update does not qualify as a collective work, then that update will not be part of any resulting registration for the group.

A GRNW registration may include the separate and independent contributions that appear within the update (such as articles, photographs, illustrations, etc.) if (1) the claimant fully owns the copyright in both the collective work compilation and the contributions on the date the claim is filed, and (2) the contributions have not been previously published or registered. A contribution to a collective work is “fully owned” by the copyright claimant if that party owns all of the exclusive rights in that contribution that are set forth in section 106 of the Copyright Act.

Note: The Copyright Office will only examine the updates for new collective work authorship. It will not examine any of the individual contributions for copyrightable authorship, nor will the Office determine if any of them are owned by the copyright claimant.

Deposit Requirements

To register a group of published updates to a news website, you must submit identifying material for each eligible update. The identifying material should show how the home page appeared at a specific point during each day of the calendar month when new updates were published on the website. The identifying material must demonstrate that the home page contains sufficient selection, coordination, or arrangement authorship to be registered as a collective work. If the home page does not demonstrate sufficient compilation authorship, the deposit should include as many additional pages as necessary to demonstrate that the updates to the news website can be registered as a collective work.

Each update must be submitted in a separate PDF file. The file size for each uploaded file must not exceed 500 megabytes, but files may be compressed to comply with this requirement. Physical deposits and zip files will not be accepted; files must be uploaded as PDFs.

If a complete copy of the home page is technically unfeasible due to the size or continuous nature of the home page, for each day of updates, you may submit one PDF showing the first twenty-five pages of the home page as it appeared at any point during that day.

File Naming Convention

Applicants are encouraged to name each PDF file using the Office’s preferred file naming convention:

The file name should include (1) the abbreviation “GRNW” (which stands for “group news websites”), (2) the name of the news website, and (3) the publication date in the following format:

GRNW_[name_of_news_website]_[publication date in YYYYMMDD format].pdf

For example, the file name for an update to the Grand Rapids Gazette website published on August 1, 2018, would be “GRNW_Grand_Rapids_Gazette_20180801.pdf.”

Important Note: Do not include any punctuation or special characters in the file name (other than underscores).

Digital Files

For each date that updates were published on the news website, you must submit a complete copy of the home page as it appeared at some point on that date (though as mentioned above, there is a limited exception to this rule if it’s not feasible to submit a “complete” copy of the home page). The entire content of the home page as it appeared on each date should be contained within one PDF file. Do not submit all of the updates within the same PDF file.

All of the PDF files for the group of updates should be assembled in an orderly form. If updates are published on the news website more than once per day, you need only submit identifying material for one of the updates published on that day.

The PDF files must be viewable and free of any access restrictions, such as password protection.

The Copyright Office encourages applicants to check the files containing their deposits before submitting them to ensure that the files open properly, and the contents have not been corrupted. Submitting files that cannot be opened or that contain corrupted contents will delay a registration decision until the Office receives uncorrupt electronic copies we are able to examine.

Uploading the Digtal Files

You must upload each update to the electronic registration system.

You may submit all files during the same upload session; you do not need to upload each file one by one. For additional guidance on how to upload files to the electronic registration system, view this tutorial.

Important Note: The file size for each PDF must not exceed 500 MB. If necessary, the files may be compressed to comply with this requirement, but you should not submit them in a compressed file, such as a .zip file.