Excerpts From Opinions in the Copyright Infringement Case
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Following are excerpts from the Supreme Court’s ruling today that publishers, by making their contents accessible through electronic databases, infringed the copyrights of freelance contributors. The vote in New York Times Company v. Tasini was 7 to 2. The majority opinion was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This copyright case concerns the rights of freelance authors and a presumptive privilege of their publishers. The litigation was initiated by six freelance authors and relates to articles they contributed to three print periodicals (two newspapers and one magazine). Under agreements with the periodicals’ publishers, but without the freelancers’ consent, two computer database companies placed copies of the freelancers’ articles — along with all other articles from the periodicals in which the freelancers’ work appeared — into three databases. Whether written by a freelancer or staff member, each article is presented to, and retrievable by, the user in isolation, clear of the context the original print publication presented. The freelance authors’ complaint alleged that their copyrights had been infringed by the inclusion of their articles in the databases. The publishers, in response, relied on the privilege of reproduction and distribution accorded them by Section 201(c) of the Copyright Act, which provides: ”Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole, and vests initially in the author of the contribution. In the absence of an express transfer of the copyright or of any rights under it, the owner of copyright in the collective work is presumed to have acquired only the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work and any later collective work in the same series.” Specifically, the publishers maintained that, as copyright owners of collective works, i.e., the original print publications, they had merely exercised ”the privilege” Section 201(c) accords them to ”reproduce and distribute” the author’s discretely copyrighted contribution. . . . For the purpose at hand — determining whether the authors’ copyrights have been infringed — an analogy to an imaginary library may be instructive. Rather than maintaining intact editions of periodicals, the library would contain separate copies of each article. Perhaps these copies would exactly reproduce the periodical pages from which the articles derive (if the model is GPO [General Periodicals OnDisc]); perhaps the copies would contain only typescript characters, but still indicate the original periodical’s name and date, as well as the article’s headline and page number (if the model is NEXIS or NYTO [New York Times OnDisc]). The library would store the folders containing the articles in a file room, indexed based on diverse criteria, and containing articles from vast numbers of editions. In response to patron requests, an inhumanly speedy librarian would search the room and provide copies of the articles matching patron-specified criteria. More : query.nytimes.com |