Robertson v Thomson Corp

363 , 2006 SCC 43 is a 2006 Supreme Court of Canada decision on the ownership of copyright in published text that are stored in databases.

In 1995, Heather Robertson, a freelance writer, wrote two articles that were published in the print edition of The Globe and Mail.

Heather Robertson objected to the presence of her articles in the databases and sued the Globe and Mail for unauthorized reproduction of her work.

It was noted that for the Globe to seek protection under its collective copyright the database must constitute a newspaper or consist of a "substantial part thereof in any material form whatever".

The Court stressed that a primary determinant of their result was the output that the user received when querying the database, not the input that the Globe put into it.