Collective work (US)

Copyright Office will apply the criteria for compilations to determine whether the author’s selection, coordination, and/or arrangement satisfies the originality requirement.

[4] Thus a website will be protected only if the author used creativity or subjective judgement to select and arrange the material.

It did not provide for the copyright to be vested initially in an individual or employee who ordered or commissioned a map, chart or book.

The work only covered American authors, allowing publishers to flood the market with cheap reprints of British books.

[14] Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397 concerned the rights of the author of the novel Dark Passage, first published as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held on 9 March 1970 that the doctrine of indivisibility could not wholly deprive an author of his copyright in a case like this.

Section 106 of the act lists the exclusive rights that the copyright owner has in a copyrighted work, which are the rights of reproduction; preparation of derivative works; distribution; public performance; public display; and digital performance in sound recordings.

[1] Multiple copies of works for classroom use may be made subject to conditions that include "not more than one short poem, article, story, essay, or two excerpts may be copied from the same author, not more than three from the same collective work or periodical volume during one class term.

[21] Metropolitan Regional Information System, Inc. v. American Home Realty Network, Inc. [722 F.3d 591] was a United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit case in which a court held that the copyright owner of a collective work such as an automated database was not required by a pre-suit copyright registration requirement to identify names of creators and titles of individual work.

[22] The Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. Tasini (2001) concerned free-lance journalists who had been paid for their contributions to paper editions of newspapers and magazines, but their contracts had not covered digital rights for reproduction on CD-ROMs or publication on the Internet.

[1] The court also discussed how the work was presented and visible to the user on the Lexis online periodical database.

It was then sued over copyright of the magazine as a collective work in Greenberg v. National Geographic and other cases, and temporarily withdrew the availability of the compilation.

On June 30, 2008, the Eleventh Circuit held that National Geographic had the right to publish faithful copies of its print magazine electronically.

The ruling noted, In the light of the Supreme Court’s holding in Tasini that the bedrock of any § 201(c) analysis is contextual fidelity to the original print publication as presented to, and perceivable by, the users of the revised version of the original publication, we agree with the Second Circuit in Faulkner and find that National Geographic is privileged to reproduce and distribute the CNG under the "revision" prong of § 201(c).