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David Roy Ellis 3233 East Bay Drive, Largo, Florida 33771 Telephone: 727-531-1111 FAX: 727-531-5088 Articles In Part Copyright Registration Requirements Strictly Upheld In two recent cases, federal appeals courts have upheld strict interpretations of the registration requirement for bringing suit in copyright cases. In Murray Hill Publications v. ABC Communications, 264 F.3d 98 (6th Cir. 2001), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled that a copyright owner must register its derivative work with the U.S. Copyright Office as a jurisdictional prerequisite to bringing a copyright infringement suit under Section 411(a), 17 U.S.C. Sec. 411(a). Under that section, "no action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title." In this case, the plaintiffs registered the copyright in an original song, but did not separately register a second song based on the first, i.e the derivative work. Under Section 101 of the Copyright Act, a "derivative work is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, . . . . A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a 'derivative work.'". The court ruled that since the statute defines a derivative work as distinct from the preexisting work, the copyright owner must formally register the derivative work with the Copyright Office before an infringement suit may be brought. In Morris v. Business Concepts, Inc., 259 F.3d 65 (2d Cir. 2001), rehearing denied (2002), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled that the registration by a publisher of the copyright in its collective work, a magazine, did not constitute registration of an individual article published in the magazine. In a case of first impression, the court ruled that the publisher's collective work registration for the magazine does not satisfy the registration requirement of Section 411(a), for the author of an unregistered article in the magazine to bring an infringement suit. These two cases thus place a greater burden on authors of derivative works, and articles, photographs, and other short works that are published as part of a larger collective work, to separately register their copyrights before they can enforce their statutory rights. Moreover, since registration of a work prior to infringement (subject to a three month grace period for published works) is also a prerequisite to obtaining attorney=s fees and statutory damages (which can range from $750 to $30,000 for each work infringed, and up to $150,000 if willful, in the discretion of the court), 17 U.S.C. Sec. 412, the courts's rulings in these cases represent a serious impediment to the ability of authors to obtain a fair redress of their injuries in the courts. Copyright 2003 David R. Ellis All rights reserved