New York Time Company, Inc. v. Tasini
United States Supreme Court
533 U.S. 483 (2001)
The New York Times (defendant) regularly published freelance-authored articles, with freelancers typically retaining copyright in their individual pieces while the Times held a separate copyright in the collective newspaper issue. The Times later licensed its collective-work content to electronic database publishers, which extracted individual articles and made them separately searchable and viewable outside the context of the original newspaper issue, without the freelance authors' agreements authorizing this reproduction. A group of freelance authors (plaintiffs) sued for copyright infringement; the district court granted summary judgment for the Times, finding the collective-work copyright covered this reuse, but the court of appeals reversed, and the Times appealed further.
Whether the owner of a copyright in a collective work, such as a newspaper issue, is entitled to reproduce and distribute the individual articles within it separately, outside the context of the original collective work, without the individual authors' consent.