Cite as: 533 U. S. 483 (2001)
Stevens, J., dissenting
would "shrink authorial rights" that "Congress [has] established." Ante, at 506 (emphasis added).
II
Not only is petitioners' position consistent with Congress' general goals in the 1976 Act, it is also consistent with the text of § 201(c). That provision allows the publisher of a collective work to "reproduc[e] and distribut[e] the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective work in the same series." The central question in this case, then, is whether petitioners are correct when they argue that publication of the respondents' articles in the various Electronic Databases at issue in this case is nothing more than "reproduc[tion] and distribut[ion] [of] the contribution as part of . . . revision[s] of [the original] collective work[s]" in which respondents' articles appeared. I agree with petitioners that neither the conversion of the Print Publishers' collective works from printed to electronic form, nor the transmission of those electronic versions of the collective works to the Electronic Databases, nor even the actions of the Electronic Databases once they receive those electronic versions does anything to deprive those electronic versions of their status as mere "revision[s]" of the original collective works.
A proper analysis of this case benefits from an incremental approach. Accordingly, I begin by discussing an issue the majority largely ignores: whether a collection of articles from a single edition of the New York Times (i. e., the batch of files the Print Publishers periodically send to the Electronic Databases) constitutes a "revision" of an individual edition of the paper. In other words, does a single article within such a collection exist as "part of" a "revision"? Like the majority, I believe that the crucial inquiry is whether the article appears within the "context" of the original collective work. Ante, at 502. But this question simply raises the further issue of precisely how much "context" is enough.
511
Page: Index Previous 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007