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Opinion of the Court
922 F. 2d 203, 205 (CA4 1991) (summarizing 796 F. 2d 701 (CA4 1986)). The court remanded the case to the District Court, which then found that Darden had been Nationwide's "employee" under the standard set by the Court of Appeals. 717 F. Supp. 388 (EDNC 1989). The Court of Appeals affirmed. 922 F. 2d 203 (1991).2
In due course, Nationwide filed a petition for certiorari, which we granted on October 15, 1991. 502 U. S. 905. We now reverse.
II
We have often been asked to construe the meaning of "employee" where the statute containing the term does not helpfully define it. Most recently we confronted this problem in Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U. S. 730 (1989), a case in which a sculptor and a nonprofit group each claimed copyright ownership in a statue the group had commissioned from the artist. The dispute ultimately turned on whether, by the terms of § 101 of the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U. S. C. § 101, the statue had been "prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment." Because the Copyright Act nowhere defined the term "employee," we unanimously applied the "well established" principle that
"[w]here Congress uses terms that have accumulated settled meaning under . . . the common law, a court must infer, unless the statute otherwise dictates, that Congress means to incorporate the established meaning of these terms. . . . In the past, when Congress has used the term 'employee' without defining it, we have concluded that Congress intended to describe the conven-2 The Court of Appeals also held that the Deferred Compensation Plan was a pension plan subject to regulation under ERISA, but that the Extended Earnings Plan was not. 922 F. 2d, at 208. We denied Darden's cross-petition for certiorari, which sought review of that conclusion. 502 U. S. 906 (1991).
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