Opinion ID: 774266
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Goodis Argument

Text: 32 Morris raises the additional argument, echoed by the amicus curiae, that not allowing her to rely on Conde Nast's registrations will produce the harsh result we counseled against in Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397, 400 (2d Cir. 1970); see also Abend v. MCA, Inc., 863 F.2d 1465, 1469-70 (9th Cir. 1988) (adopting Goodis holding). In Goodis, we examined whether, under the prior Copyright Act of 1909, notice of copyright by a magazine was sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the author of an individual work contained in the magazine and concluded that it was. See id. at 399. Unlike the current Copyright Act, the prior Act mandated indivisibility of copyright, which meant that if the author did not obtain a copyright in his work, publication would put the work into the public domain. We said in Goodis that we were loath to bring about the unnecessarily harsh result of thrusting the author's product into the public domain, id. at 400, when it was clear from the magazine's copyright notice that the author did not intend such a result. 33 Morris asks us to draw a parallel between the loss of copyright faced by the plaintiff in Goodis and the loss of access to statutory damages she faces here. Although we are not without sympathy for the burden § 411(a)'s registration requirement places on journalists such as Morris, as well as on all those for whom registering copyrights is an overwhelming financial and temporal commitment, we do not think that that burden is equivalent to the loss of copyright altogether. Unlike the plaintiff in Goodis, Morris will continue to retain all rights in her work. Moreover, if she registers her copyrights in her articles, she will be able to collect statutory damages against future infringers. We do not consider this a harsh result on par with the situation we addressed in Goodis. 34 Perhaps more importantly, the result we sought to avoid in Goodis was the product of a judge-made rule, 425 F.2d at 400, while here we are faced with a statute requiring registration as a predicate to obtaining statutory damages. See 17 U.S.C. § 412 (2000). We of course are not in a position to second-guess Congress's decision to enact this statute, and are unwilling to create an exception to it that might disrupt the statutory scheme of the Copyright Act. 5 We therefore decline to extend our holding in Goodis to reach the facts of Morris's case.