Case 1:22-cv-01564-BAH Document 17 Filed 02/07/23 Page 12 of 34
The Office’s decision also relied on its many years of experience interpreting and applying copyright law. It collects this understanding of the law and provides standards for examining and registering works in its Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices (Third Edition) (Compendium). Updates to the Compendium are typically adopted following a period for public notice and comment. See U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Introduction at 7 (3d. ed. 2021) (Compendium (Third)) (referencing welcoming public input on the Compendium during “formal notice and commenting periods”). The Office looks to the Compendium when reviewing copyright registration applications, including with regard to the requirements for copyrightability. As other courts have recognized, registration decisions that have been based on “the Copyright Act, the content of related regulations, and the Compendium … can hardly be deemed to be ‘arbitrary and capricious’” and such reasonable determinations “must be accorded substantial deference.” Yu Zhang v. Heineken N.V., No. CV 08-06506, 2010 WL 4457460, at *6 (C.D. Cal. May 12, 2010) (citation omitted).
The Compendium contains several sections addressing the human authorship requirement. The Compendium specifies “the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work.” Compendium (Third) § 306. Likewise, the Compendium provides that copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual
16 at 7, but the Office did not consider whether other registration requirements, including that the work must be “original,” were met. The term “original” means that the work was independently created by the author, as opposed to copied from other works. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Services, Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Because Plaintiff provided minimal information as to how the Work was prepared, the Office is unable to determine whether the Work meets this standard because, among other potentially relevant facts, the Office does not know what preexisting works the Creativity Machine was trained on.
The Act excludes copyright protection for “any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).
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