New Copyright Rule Makes Registration Easier for Bloggers

The Copyright Office created the new rule in response to a petition submitted in 2017 by the National Writers Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Inc., and the Horror Writers Association, with the endorsement and support of The Authors Guild, the Association of Garden Communicators, the Society of Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators, the Songwriters Guild of America, and the Textbook & Academic Authors Association. The petition declared an urgent need for a group registration option for short pieces of writing published and distributed online, including blog entries, social media posts, short articles, “bite-sized” fiction, and copyrightable tweets.

A new form, the GRTX form, has been created specially for online submissions through the eCO portal in compliance with the new rule. To fulfill the deposit requirement, an applicant must submit a .zip file with complete copies of each work to be registered in a separate digital file and under a separate title, and the applicant must also provide a title for the entire group. Applicants will also need to state, for each work, the date of online publication and the nation in which the work was published.

The new rule has important limitations. First, corporate entities and persons who acquire copyright ownership in works as works made for hire cannot use form GRTX: the rule is meant to accommodate the persons who are both the authors of the works, either as individual applicants or joint author applicants, and also the copyright owners in the works. In its justification for this limitation when it first proposed the new rule, the Copyright Office explained that the rule “is intended to benefit individual writers who publish their works on the internet, but do not have the time or resources to register their works with the Office.” Second, although the Copyright Act allows authors to claim copyright in the selection or arrangement of works in a group, or in a group of works as a compilation or collective work, applicants cannot make such copyright registration claims on form GRTX. And, third, the rule is specifically limited to “literary works,” which means that form GRTX cannot be used to register the copyrights in groups of photographs or videos.

U.S. copyright law provides the owner of a copyright with effective enforcement tools, but their use is usually preconditioned on registration. Because the new “Group Registration of Short Online Literary Works” rule smooths the way to registration of short online works by allowing up to fifty such works to be registered via one application and one filing fee, it should incentivize online authors who are continuously generating new content to shore up their copyright protection in their online writings through early and repeated registrations at three-month intervals.