A federal appeals court has re-instated stock photo agency Alaska Stock’s copyright infringement claim against textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin, reversing a lower court decision to dismiss the case due to the fact that the stock agency had registered its images improperly.
The decision signifies that Alaska Stock now gets the chance to attempt its copyright claims in court.
The case is a victory for photographers and other copyright owners as it upholds a streamlined process for registering images in bulk as a collected work. Specifically, the court affirmed the authority of the united states Copyright office “to grant registration to individual stock photographs within a set where the names of every of the photographers, and titles for every of the pictures, weren’t provided at the registration forms.”
“The livelihoods of photographers and stock agencies have long been founded on their compliance with the Register’s reasonable interpretation of the [copyright] statute,” the united states Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in its decision. “Denying the fruits of reliance by citizens on a longstanding administrative practice reasonably construing a statute is unjust.”
The ruling came when it comes to Alaska Stock v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which began in 2009 when Alaska Stock sued the publisher for using Alaska Stock images way past the scope of the unique usage license. Specifically, the publisher “greatly exceeded” the print run limit of the license it had paid for.
Houghton Mifflin challenged the claim considering the fact that Alaska Stock had improperly registered the pictures in question. (Federal law requires valid registration of any copyrighted work that’s the subject of a federal copyright claim.)
Alaska Stock had registered the pictures in bulk, as a listing, listing names of only three photographers, and describing the pictures most of the time, but not listing a title for every photograph.
The district court agreed with Houghton Mifflin that Alaska Stock’s registration was “defective” since the agency had not provided the names of every of the photographers and the titles of every of the pictures in its registration application, as required “unambiguously” by law, in step with the district court decision.
But the appeals court overturned that call since it conflicted with an extended-standing practice by the Register of Copyrights, undercut the legal authority of the Register of Copyrights to determine procedures of copyright registration–and amounted to a misreading of copyright law by the district court.
The appeals court noted that for greater than 30 years, owners of collected works–notably magazines and newspaper publishers–was legally registering both the collected work and the person underlying works with one application, without listing all of the authors or titles of the person works. To do otherwise would put an undue burden on applicants and the Register of Copyrights, the court noted
The one caveat to that practice is that applicants for registration must own copyright to the collected work and the complete underlying works, the appeals court noted.
In its decision, the appeals court also validated a 1995 letter from the Register of Copyright to the image Agency Council of America (PACA) prescribing a technique for registering large catalogues of pictures. “The Register agreed that a stock agency could register both a catalog of pictures and the person photographs within the catalog in a single application if the photographers temporarily transferred their copyright to the stock agency for the needs of registration,” the appeals court said in its ruling.
Alaska Stock did exactly that, asking its photographers to transfer copyrights to the agency for the point of registering the pictures in bulk, after which filing a registration application for a CD catalogue of imagery. (The agency arranged to transfer copyrights back to the photographers after the registration was completed.)
In reviewing the registration requirements spelled out under copyright law, the appeals court said the law requires only that copyright owners provide a title of the collected work and an outline (not titles) of the underlying works. Alaska Stock met that requirement, the appeals court said, by registering the pictures as a collected work called “Alaska Stock CD catalog 4,” and by identifying the underlying works as “CD catalog of stock photos” on its registration form.
The appeals court said the statue requires the name of the writer of “the work”–ie, the collected work, not every author of the the person works. The stock agency met the requirement by listing itself [Alaska Stock] because the author of the collective work, the appeals court said.
The appeals court noted that Houghton Mifflin’s arguments have prevailed in different district court decisions in other similar cases, “but we don’t consider them,” the appeals court added.
In those cases, the courts threw out copyright claims as the registrations were “defective,” i.e., they didn’t list all of the image authors and image titles.
Three of these cases were filed within the Ninth Circuit. One case was settled; two others are under appeal, and should probably be re-instated as a result Alaska Stock decision. “Judges within the Ninth Circuit need to follow the ruling of the court of appeals” in that circuit, says Maurice Harmon, who represents the plaintiffs in all of the cases, including the Alaska Stock case.
A fourth case is on appeal in Manhattan, that is within the Second Circuit. Judges there aren’t bound by the Ninth Circuit decision inside the Alaska Stock case. But Harmon believes judges in other circuits “will take it into account.
“We predict that on the court of appeals level, we’re beginning to get momentum for all of those cases,” he adds.
Harmon also says, “It galls me that these [textbook] publishers, who use compilation registrations [to offer protection to their very own works], would turn their backs at the very thing they depend upon to win a technical victory to take the courthouse keys clear of photographers.
“But they know that after a photographer gets inside the door of the courthouse, the publishers aren’t going to escape with this copyright infringement.”
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