Portal:Review Board of the United States Copyright Office

“ After carefully examining the Work, considering the arguments made in the First and Second Requests, and the communications with Mockingbird Press for clarification, the Board finds that the Work does not contain the requisite authorship necessary to sustain a claim to copyright.
A work may be registered if it qualifies as an "original work [] of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression." 17 U.S.C. § 102 (a) . In the copyright context, the term "original" consists of two components: independent creation and sufficient creativity. ”

“ Mockingbird Press alleges that the copyrightable authorship is demonstrated by selecting from a large, diverse pool of material and arranging the three works in an original way. The Board disagrees. Selecting, coordinating, and arranging three works does not demonstrate sufficient creativity to be copyrightable. “The Office generally will not register a compilation containing only two or three elements, because the selection is necessarily de minimis.” ”

“ Second, the work must possess sufficient creativity. Id. Only a modicum of creativity is necessary, but the Supreme Court has held that some works fail to meet even this low threshold. Id. The original authorship in a compilation may be found in selecting, coordinating, or arranging material in a sufficiently original way. Id. at 358; see also U.S. Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 312.2 (3d ed. 2021) (“Compendium (Third) ”) .
The Work consists of three public domain writings, all containing images and text originally present in the public domain works. ”