Alaska Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.

OPINION

KLEINFELD, Senior Circuit Judge:

We address whether copyright registration of a collective work registered the component works within it.

Facts

This case was dismissed for failure to state a claim, so we assume for purposes of analysis that the facts were as pleaded in the complaint.

Alaska Stock, a stock photography agency, registered large numbers of photographs at a time, listing only some of the authors and not listing titles for each photograph. It licensed Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company to use pictures it had registered, for fees based on the number of publications.…