The U.S. Supreme Court has given a victory to freelance authors of newspaper and magazine articles, and a defeat to some major publishers of their work. The publishers hired the authors as independent contractors who would contribute articles to what is known in copyright law as a “collective work,” that is, a newspaper or magazine. Under federal copyright law, the publishers were the owners of the copyright in the collective work, giving them the right to reproduce and distribute the contributions as part of the collective work or any revision of that work. The writers themselves, however, retained the rights to their individual articles.
The dispute arose when the publishers, without obtaining the authors’ permission or agreeing to provide extra compensation to them, licensed the rights to copy and sell articles to a computerized database of periodicals and to the producer of CD‑ROM products. When the authors claimed an infringement of their copyrights in their articles, the publishers defended by arguing that making the articles available on line or in a CD‑ROM form constituted simply a “revision” of the collective work that was within the copyright of the collective work held by the publishers.
The Supreme Court sided with the writers. The newly created databases no longer presented and distributed the articles as part of the collective work in which they first appeared, or as part of a revision of that work. Instead, the articles stood alone and out of their original context. Each article had become merely a minuscule part of an ever‑expanding database. As the Court put it, “The database no more constitutes a `revision’ of each constituent edition than a 400‑page novel quoting a sonnet in passing would represent a `revision’ of that poem[.]” Therefore, the electronic reproduction of the authors’ works could not be allowed without their permission.