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 that the case turned on the second element: whether Sohm could establish “unauthorized copying.” Id.

The court first considered Scholastic’s motion for partial summary judgment on the grounds that (1) Sohm’s copyright registrations were invalid for certain photographs; (2) Scholastic did not exceed the relevant licenses for certain uses; and (3) Sohm had failed to meet his burden to show that Scholastic exceeded the license with respect to certain uses. Id. at *3. Scholastic challenged the validity of the copyright registration based on group registration under Corbis’s name, asserting that the registrations failed to list the name of the “author” as required by 17 U.S.C. § 409(2). The court explained that there is no binding Second Circuit authority on the question of 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, even if the compilation does not list the individual authors of the individual photos. Id. at *3–6. The court acknowledged that Muench Photography, Inc. v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 712 F. Supp. 2d 84 (S.D.N.Y. 2010), concluded that the plain language of the Copyright Act, which requires “the name and nationality or domicile of the author or authors” to be included in a registration, 17 U.S.C. § 409(2), rendered this type of group registration insufficient to constitute registration of the individual images therein. Sohm, 2018 WL 1605214, at *4. However, the court noted, the Ninth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in Alaska Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 747 F.3d 673 (9th Cir. 2014). Alaska Stock held that if photographers have assigned their copyright to the stock agency and the agency registers the collection, “both the collection as a whole and the individual images are registered,” even if only the agency’s name is listed as an author. Id. at 682.

The district court adopted Alaska Stock’s reasoning, agreeing that the operative word in § 409(2) is “work,” not “author.” Sohm, 2018 WL 1605214, at *4. The name of the author of the “work” must be provided, and, in Sohm’s ease, the author of the collective work – Corbis – was in fact included in the registration. The court determined that Muench improperly relied on 17 U.S.C. § 103 in rejecting this interpretation, as § 103 deals with the subject matter of copyright rather than the conceptually distinct issue of registration. Id. The court reasoned further that Alaska Stock’s interpretation was bolstered by the longstanding practice of the Copyright Office and its manuals and opinion letters, which were entitled to Skidmore deference – particularly in light of policy considerations such as efficiency. Id. at *5. Because registration of an unpublished collection extends to each copyrightable element therein, the court concluded that the valid group registration also registered each individual image. Id. at *5–6 (citing 37 C.F.R. § 202.3(b)(4) (2018)).

The district court then turned to Scholastic’s claim that there was insufficient evidence of unauthorized copying. Id. at *8–9. For one group of 12 uses, the undisputed facts demonstrated that Scholastic did not exceed the print runs under the licenses. Sohm maintained that Scholastic could not prove that it did not violate the licenses’ geographic limitations, even if it did not exceed their print runs, but the court determined that Sohm, not Scholastic, bore the burden on this question because the scope, not the existence, of the licenses was in question. Id. The court