Cite as: 533 U. S. 483 (2001)
Stevens, J., dissenting
headline, etc.), should not be characterized as a "part of" a larger collective work, I would not say the same about an individual article existing as "part of" a collection of articles containing all the editorial content of that day's New York Times. This is all the more true because, as the District Court correctly noted, it is the Print Publishers' selection process, the editorial process by which the staff of the New York Times, for example, decides which articles will be included in "All the News That's Fit to Print," that is the most important creative element they contribute to the collective works they publish. 972 F. Supp. 804, 823 (SDNY 1997).12
While such superficial features as page placement and column width are lost in ASCII format, the Print Publishers' all-important editorial selection is wholly preserved in the collection of individual article files sent to the Electronic Databases.
To see why an electronic version of the New York Times made up of a group of individual ASCII article files, standing alone, may be considered a § 201(c) revision, suppose that, instead of transmitting to NEXIS the articles making up a particular day's edition, the New York Times saves all of the individual files on a single floppy disk, labels that disk "New York Times, October 31, 2000," and sells copies of the disk to users as the electronic version of that day's New York Times. The disk reproduces the creative, editorial selection of that edition of the New York Times. The reader, after all, has at his fingertips substantially all of the relevant content of the October 31 edition of the collective work. Moreover, each individual article makes explicit reference to that selection by including tags that remind the reader that it is a part of the New York Times for October 31, 2000. Such a disk might well constitute "that particular collective work"; it would surely qualify as a "revision" of the original collec-12 "The New York Times perhaps even represents the paradigm, the epitome of a publication in which selection alone reflects sufficient originality to merit copyright protection." 972 F. Supp., at 823.
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