US Copyright Office Proposes New Collective Registration for News Sites

Last week, the United States Copyright Office (USCO) announced a new proposal to enable group registration of updates to a news website. 

According to the USCO, the proposed rule change comes after discussions with online news publishers, who expressed frustration over the current registration options, calling them “expensive and burdensome.” 

Under the new registration guidelines, news websites would be able to submit a registration for one calendar month worth of content as a collective registration. Instead of submitting a copy of each update, the registration would only require “identifying material,” namely a PDF copy of the home page of the site taken once per day, as well as titles and URLs of the website.  

The USCO did say it was considering giving applicants the choice of adding titles and URLs of specific updates as part of the registration option. 

According to the USCO, the goal of this is to increase participation in the registration process by news websites. The USCO says that they recognize the current system, which requires a separate filing for each website update, is burdensome and is causing many to not use the system even though they would benefit from it. 

The USCO is seeking comment on the new system with a deadline of February 20, 2024, to file them.  

But while the new system does offer some marked improvements for some creators, this new proposal is extremely limited, both in terms of how it works and who it is intended to help. 

Significant Limitations, Few Fixes 

The biggest limitation of the proposed new system is who it is meant for. According to the USCO, this process is exclusively for “news websites” as per their definition. In the full proposal, they set their definition as follows: 

a website that is mainly 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. 

To make matters more complicated, the registration requires that the group be created as a work made for hire. This means that news sites with guest posts or independent contractors that retain copyright, would not qualify for this registration or that, at the very least, those works would have to be omitted.  

Obviously, that limits the number of sites and companies that this can apply to. While this would cover most traditional newspapers and mainstream media outlets, blogs, news sites in a particular niche or other publishers would struggle to qualify. 

However, there is still another serious limitation. Since it is a registration as a compilation, the work must qualify for copyright protection based on the whether the collective work qualifies. This means it must “contain a sufficiently creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of the individual component works.” 

But, even if the registration is obtained, it will contain a disclaimer that only the compilation authorship was examined, meaning that filers may have still have to prove in court, or elsewhere, that the content was published at a specific time.  

Also, since the registration would be collective, it would be considered one work for the purpose of damages, limiting potential statutory damages to $150,000 per infringer regardless of how many works within the collection were infringed.  

To put it mildly, these are significant limitations and even those who do qualify for it may want to examine whether it is worthwhile.  

That said, there are some reasons to hope, even if you do not qualify to use this new system. 

A Glimmer of Hope 

It is fair to call this new process what it is: A hack. 

The USCO has recognized that the current registration process is burdensome to news sites, and it is trying to find a way to tweak the existing system to alleviate that burden. The problem is that the current system is hopelessly broken and out of date with the realities of modern creators.  

The USCO did not offer an electronic registration system until 2007. However, even at the time of release, the system was dated. It was ugly, did not follow web standards, ignored current technologies and was incredibly confusing, especially to those unfamiliar with copyright. 

Sadly, the system has not evolved significantly since then. Though they introduced a new group registration aimed at bloggers in 2020, it too was a hack. Though it did make registration more approachable for such sites, it was still too cumbersome, too expensive, and too burdensome for most sites (including mine). 

With that in mind, the best news in the announcement was the last line:  

The Office is aware of the technological constraints of the current electronic registration system and expects to revisit the features of this registration option, especially once its web-based, cloud-hosted Enterprise Copyright System is in place. 

The USCO released an RFI for such a system in May 2020. However, little has been heard about it since then. This is a strong indication that a revamp of the registration system is coming, even if it is likely a long way off. 

While this does not address the issues raised in the new process, it is at least an indication that the USCO is aware of how out of touch its system is and is taking a big swing to try and address that issue. 

Bottom Line 

To put it mildly, I’ve been a critic of the registration requirement for a very long time. No other nation in the world puts a similar requirement on creators, it is dubious whether it complies with international treaties, it prevents poor and ignorant creators from being able to effectively sue for copyright infringement and the entire process is cumbersome, confusing, and easy for even the most knowledgeable creators to get wrong. 

Any benefits from the system are drastically outweighed by the drawbacks, the expense, and the limitations of requiring such a system in the first place. 

But, if we are going to have such a system, great care should be taken to reduce the burden of it. This includes reducing the cost, time and knowledge required to participate in it.  

To the USCO’s credit, it has tried over the years to reduce that burden. However, with the current system, the best it is managed to do is create hacks to try and blunt some of the sharper pain points. 

This latest proposal is one such example. It does not address the core problem that news sites, and other creators, face with the registration process, but tries to find workarounds to make that problem less egregious. 

A wholly new system, if it does come online, may be the best hope to effectively address many of these issues. Though no system will be as simple or non-burdensome as simply removing the requirement, it creates an opportunity to address the serious systemic issues that plague the copyright registration process. 

So, I am hoping that the USCO and its partners take those steps and finally bring some real relief to creators, who have long struggled to secure timely registrations and effectively enforce their copyright.