514
Stevens, J., dissenting
electronic versions and microform are necessitated by the electronic medium. The Court therefore appears to back away from principles of media neutrality when it implicitly criticizes ASCII-text files for their inability to reproduce "Remembering Jane" "in the very same position, within a film reproduction of the entire Magazine, in turn within a reproduction of the entire September 23, 1990, edition." Ante, at 501.11
In contrast, I think that a proper respect for media neutrality suggests that the New York Times, reproduced as a collection of individual ASCII files, should be treated as a "revision" of the original edition, as long as each article explicitly refers to the original collective work and as long as substantially the rest of the collective work is, at the same time, readily accessible to the reader of the individual file. In this case, no one disputes that the first pieces of information a user sees when looking at an individual ASCII article file are the name of the publication in which the article appeared, the edition of that publication, and the location of the article within that edition. I agree with the majority that such labeling alone is insufficient to establish that the individual file exists as "part of" a revision of the original collective work. See ante, at 500-501. But such labeling is not all there is in the group of files sent to the Electronic Databases.
In addition to the labels, the batch of electronic files contains the entire editorial content of the original edition of the New York Times for that day. That is, while I might agree that a single article, standing alone, even when coded with identifying information (e. g., publication, edition date,
11 The majority's reliance on the fact that the GPO user cannot "flip" the page to see material published on other pages, ante, at 491, n. 2, and that the text database articles "appear disconnected from their original context," ante, at 501, appears to be nothing more than a criticism of Electronic Databases' medium-driven decision to break down the periodicals it contains into smaller, less unwieldy article units. See n. 9, supra.
Page: Index Previous 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007