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Concerning Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co, 856 F.2d 1341 (9th Cir. 1988), cert. denied, 489 U.S. 1018 (1989). Mirage has been disclaimed by most other circuits and by many legal scholars: including Nimmer:

In Mirage ... as a necessary step in applying the first step, the court ruled that a derivative work was created.... [T]he court held that removing reproductions of art works from a `compilation of selected copyrighted individual art works,' and thereafter mounting those reproductions onto ceramic tile, resulted in the creation of derivative works.... [W]as the court correct in that conclusion? Even apart from the questionable contribution of intellectual labor in the physical activities of page-removal and mounting ... it is difficult to imagine that the artist (or his widow, a plaintiff in the case) could take separately copyrighted individual art works and, merely by reproducing them in a compilation and then taking the reproduced pages out of the compilation and remounting them, thereby obtain a new copyright in the same art works. For the sole contribution added in this process is the method of mounting; choosing ceramic rather than cardboard as the backing material should scarcely be construed as a "meaningful" variation in the eyes of the Copyright Act. It is therefore submitted that the court's analysis was in error. A later case against the same defendant ruled that mounting an artist's lithographs and notecards onto tiles was similarly infringing. This case did not even involve disassembling a collective work into which the authorized prints had been gathered; instead, it involved an activity not far afield from mounting and framing. The court distinguished the activity at bar because "it is commonly understood that [framing] amounts to only a method of display" and because "it is a relatively simple matter to remove the print or painting [from the frame] and display it differently if the owner chooses to do so." Neither proposition is supported in the court's opinion; even if true, the question remains unanswered how tile-mounting creates a meaningful variation that itself could support copyright protection. 1 Nimmer on Copyrights, § 3.03.