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 copyright infringement claim. 17 U.S.C. § 411(a). Thus, without a valid copyright registration, a plaintiff cannot bring a viable copyright infringement action. The Copyright Act requires that an “application for copyright registration shall be made on a form prescribed by the Register of Copyrights and shall include … the name … of the author or authors [of the work].” Id. § 409(2).

We must decide whether the registration of a compilation of photographs under § 409 by an applicant that holds the rights to the component works also effectively registers the underlying individual photos where the compilation does not list the individual authors of the individual photos. Our Court has yet to address this question, and the courts that have addressed it have arrived at conflicting conclusions. For example, in Muench, the district court concluded that interpreting the Copyright Act to allow group registrations to register the individual photographs contained therein, where the group registrations do not include the name of the authors of the individual photographs, contravened the Act’s plain language. 712 F. Supp. 2d at 92. However, in Alaska Stock, the Ninth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion, holding that if “”

We agree with the district court below and the Ninth Circuit. The plain language of § 409(2) does not require a group registrant like Corbis to include each individual author of each individual work in the compilation to effectively register those individual works. The key word in § 409(2) is “work” instead of “author.” As the Ninth Circuit explained, “[t]his subsection says that the name of the author or authors of ‘the work’ must be provided, the statute defines a ‘collective work’ as being a type of ‘work,’ and here, the author of the collective work was” Corbis. Alaska Stock, 747 F.3d at 681 (footnote omitted). Consequently, to obtain a valid group registration under § 409(2), “[t]he ‘author or authors’ that must be listed … are the author or authors of the collective work itself.” Id. The Corbis group registrations all satisfied this requirement by listing Corbis as the author of the collective work.

Accordingly, the district court properly determined that Corbis validly registered each of the photographs in the relevant group registrations.

For the foregoing’ reasons, we AFFIRM the district court’s (1) recitation of the elements of a copyright infringement claim and its placement of the burden of proof on Sohm to demonstrate Scholastic’s use of his images outside the scope of the license; (2) conclusion that the discovery rule applies for statute of limitations purposes in determining when Sohm’s copyright infringement claims accrued; and (3) determination that Corbis’s group registrations were valid under the Copyright Act for Sohm’s individual photographs. We REVERSE the district court’s (1) finding that Scholastic’s use of Sohm’s copyrighted work sounded in breach of contract and not copyright infringement; (2) dismissal of Sohm’s claim corresponding to Row 4 of Exhibit 5 to the First Amended Complaint; and (3) allowance of damages for more