Collective work
A collective work is a work that contains the works of several authors assembled and published under the direction of one natural or legal person who owns the copyright in the work as a whole.
Definitions vary considerably from one country to another, but usually treat ownership of the work as a whole as distinct from ownership of the individual contributions, so the individual authors may retain the right to publish their work elsewhere.
It is common for publication of articles on the Internet, when isolated from the context of the overall work, to be considered to be outside of the standard agreement between the author and the owner of the collective work.
General
International agreements
Many countries have agreed to be bound by the terms of the Berne Convention and/or the TRIPS Agreement.Article 2.5 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works specifies: "Collections of literary or artistic works such as encyclopaedias and anthologies which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such, without prejudice to the copyright in each of the works forming part of such collections."
Section 10.2 of the TRIPS Agreement, to which members of the World Trade Organization are bound, states, "Compilations of data or other material, whether in machine readable or other form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such. Such protection, which shall not extend to the data or material itself, shall be without prejudice to any copyright subsisting in the data or material itself."
Limitation on publisher rights
In general, the author of a contribution to a collective work retains the copyright, and the publisher does not have the right to reuse the contribution in some context other than the collective work without the express consent of the author.In England it has been held that exploiting the work of a freelance newspaper photographer in a back numbers website was a use that had not been contemplated in the original license and was not covered by the license.
Such reuse would also infringe the journalist's copyright in the United States.
In a 1997 case in the Netherlands it was held that reuse of newspaper articles on a website and CD-ROM went beyond the implied license.
In Germany any attempt by the author to grant rights to exploit their work in a way that was unknown when the contract was made is null and void under the law.
In France, online publication is considered fundamentally different from print publication.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons legal code for Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 defines a collective work as:The license for a CC2.0 work allows the user to incorporate the CC2.0 work in a collective work in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The collective work does not have to be released under a Creative Commons license, but access to the incorporated CC2.0 work must be consistent with the CC2.0 license, and the author must be credited.
Common law countries
The British Statute of Anne was the first copyright law in the world.The statute is considered a "watershed event in Anglo-American copyright history ... transforming what had been the publishers' private law copyright into a public law grant".
Under the statute, copyright was for the first time vested in authors rather than publishers; it also included provisions for the public interest, such as a legal deposit scheme. The statute was an influence on copyright law in several other nations, including the United States, and even in the 21st century is "frequently invoked by modern judges and academics as embodying the utilitarian underpinnings of copyright law".
Australia
In Australia a collective work is a work composed of separate parts that each attract their own copyright.An example would be a song in which the author of the music and the author of the lyrics each have copyright in their contribution.
The authors have a moral right to be attributed, but only if they are author of a substantial part and it is reasonable to identify the author.
It may be unreasonable to attribute each author in a collective work such as an encyclopedia.
Canada
Under Canadian copyright law, a collective work means:When the author of a work is the first owner of copyright, any rights granted by the author revert to his estate.
However, this does not apply to the assignment of the copyright in a collective work or a licence to publish a work or part of a work as
part of a collective work.
Robertson v Thomson Corp, is a 2006 Supreme Court of Canada decision on the ownership of copyright in published text that are stored in databases. The ruling held that though a newspaper held the copyright in the collection and the arrangement of freelance articles and in its newspaper, it could not publish the articles within a database. Publication within the database would remove the articles from the context of the collective work and therefore their publication as such was not within the rights held by the newspaper.
Robertson decided that freelance journalists' copyright can stop the republication of their articles onto databases which display one article at a time but not onto CD-ROMs featuring whole newspapers. The court decided that a CD-ROM in which individual articles may only be viewed in the context of a whole newspaper is not a republication of an individual article as an individual work, but is rather a reproduction of the newspaper as a whole as a work.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom section 178 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 defines a collective work as either " a work of joint authorship or a work in which there are distinct contributions by different authors or in which works or parts of works of different authors are incorporated."The general principle is that authors who contribute to a collective work have the right to control future exploitation in their works unless this is expressly waived in the contract.
The editor receives a separate copyright in the collective work for their efforts as long as they meet the originality standard set by the government.
The copyright law related to collective works does not provide an exception to the general European term of protection of 70 years following death, which would apply to death of the last surviving author.
The Copyright Act 1842 stated that the authors of contributions to collective works did not retain full copyright control over their works. However, they had the right to be paid, the right to refuse consent for additional uses of their work, reversion of copyright after 28 years and the ability to publish their own work.
The 1911 Act, which replaced the 1842 Act, stated that the owner of a collective work would only gain ownership of the copyright of contributions where they had given or promised some valuable consideration and there was no agreement to the contrary.
The author would retain copyright if this could be inferred from the mutual intention of the parties.
Under the Copyright Act 1911, no copyright vests in the proprietor of a collective work unless the author is employed under a contract of service or apprenticeship, or there is an assignment in writing; and when the copyright vests in the proprietor of a periodical by reason of a contract of service or apprenticeship, the author may restrain separate publication.
With the 1911 act the author of a contribution would regain copyright after 25 years, but this would be concurrent with the publisher's right in the collective work.
It was argued that reversion of full rights to the author would have been "a great hardship to proprietors of collective works, particularly of those permanent in nature, such as ecyclopaedias, if they could not have acquired from the author an unfettered right to produce the work at any future time as part of the collective work."
The author could, however, restrain the publisher from transferring or licensing their work to others.
Under the Copyright Act 1956 employees retained copyright in their work unless there was an agreement to the contrary.
The CDPA removed the waiver on employee rights.
United States
In the Copyright law of the United States, the Copyright Act of 1976, section 101, defines a collective work as "a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole".It is protected as long as the "author" can show that the selection and organization of the contributions is original, and that these contribution can themselves be protected, as opposed to being mere facts such as statistical data.
Article 201 states, "Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole, and vests initially in the author of the contribution. 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".
The compiler, or author of the collection, owns copyright in the expression he or she contributed, which is primarily the selection and arrangement of the separate contributions, but may include such things as a preface, advertisements, etc., that the collective author created.
The contributions remain the property of the authors by default, but the property may be passed to the owner of the collective work by contract.
They may also obtain ownership of the contributions if they are works made for hire.
The Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. Tasini concerned free-lance journalists who had been paid for their contributions to paper editions of newspapers and magazines, but their contracts had not covered digital rights for reproduction on CD-ROMs or publication on the Internet.
When the articles were distributed in electronic form a few years later, the court ruled that this did not constitute a revision of the work, because the articles could be accessed individually.
A revision must maintain the articles in their context of origin.
In Faulkner v. National Geographic Enterprises Inc., a Court of Appeal ruled that an electronic version of a newspaper was a revision of the collective work if it reproduced the paper version identically, including advertisements and photographs.