Cite as: 533 U. S. 483 (2001)
Stevens, J., dissenting
microform, even though such revisions might look and feel quite different from the original. Such differences, however, would largely result from the different medium being employed. Similarly, the decision to convert the single collective work newspaper into a collection of individual ASCII files can be explained as little more than a decision that reflects the different nature of the electronic medium. Just as the paper version of the New York Times is divided into "sections" and "pages" in order to facilitate the reader's navigation and manipulation of large batches of newsprint, so too the decision to subdivide the electronic version of that collective work into individual article files facilitates the reader's use of the electronic information. The barebones nature of ASCII text would make trying to wade through a single ASCII file containing the entire content of a single edition of the New York Times an exercise in frustration.9
Although the Court does not separately discuss the question whether the groups of files that the New York Times sends to the Electronic Databases constitute "revision[s]," its reasoning strongly suggests that it would not accept such a characterization. The majority, for example, places signifi-cant emphasis on the differences between the various Electronic Databases and microform, a medium that admittedly qualifies as a revision under § 201(c).10 As with the conversion of individual editions into collections of separate article files, however, many of the differences between the
9 An ASCII version of the October 31, 2000, New York Times, which contains 287 articles, would fill over 500 printed pages. Conversely, in the case of graphical products like GPO, the demands that memory-intensive graphics files can place on underpowered computers make it appropriate for electronic publishers to divide the larger collective work into manageably sized subfiles. The individual article is the logical unit. The GPO version of the April 7, 1996, New York Times Magazine, for example, would demand in the neighborhood of 200 megabytes of memory if stored as a single file, whereas individual article files range from 4 to 22 megabytes, depending on the length of the article.
10 See Brief for Respondents Garson et al. 4-5, n. 3.
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