496
Opinion of the Court
ferred . . . and owned separately," § 201(d)(2).5 Congress also provided, in § 404(a), that "a single notice applicable to the collective work as a whole is sufficient" to protect the rights of freelance contributors. And in § 201(c), Congress codified the discrete domains of "[c]opyright in each separate contribution to a collective work" and "copyright in the collective work as a whole." Together, § 404(a) and § 201(c) "preserve the author's copyright in a contribution even if the contribution does not bear a separate notice in the author's name, and without requiring any unqualified transfer of rights to the owner of the collective work." H. R. Rep. 122.
Section 201(c) both describes and circumscribes the "privilege" a publisher acquires regarding an author's contribution to a collective work:
"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." (Emphasis added.)
A newspaper or magazine publisher is thus privileged to reproduce or distribute an article contributed by a freelance author, absent a contract otherwise providing, only "as part of" any (or all) of three categories of collective works: (a) "that collective work" to which the author contributed her work, (b) "any revision of that collective work," or (c) "any later collective work in the same series." In accord with Congress' prescription, a "publishing company could reprint
vidual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
"(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission."
5 It bears repetition here, see supra, at 493, that we neither decide nor express any view on whether the § 201(c) "privilege" may be transferred.
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