NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY, INC., et al., PETITIONERS v. JONATHAN TASINI et al. on writ of certiorari from the United States Court of Appeals (2d Circuit) U.S. SUPREME COURT [June 25, 2001] Justice Ginsburg delivered the opinion of the Court. This copyright case concerns the rights of freelance authors and a presumptive privilege of their publishers. The litigation was initiated by six freelance authors and relates to articles they contributed to three print periodicals (two newspapers and one magazine). Under agreements with the periodicals publishers, but without the freelancers consent, two computer database companies placed copies of the freelancers articles along with all other articles from the periodicals in which the freelancers work appeared into three databases. Whether written by a freelancer or staff member, each article is presented to, and retrievable by, the user in isolation, clear of the context the original print publication presented. The freelance authors complaint alleged that their copyrights had been infringed by the inclusion of their articles in the databases. The publishers, in response, relied on the privilege of reproduction and distribution accorded them by 201(c) of the Copyright Act, which provides: 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. 17 U.S.C. 201(c). Specifically, the publishers maintained that, as copyright owners of collective works, i.e., the original print publications, they had merely exercised the privilege 201(c) accords them to reproduc[e] and distribut[e] the authors discretely copyrighted contribution. In agreement with the Second Circuit, we hold that 201(c) does not authorize the copying at issue here. The publishers are not sheltered by 201(c), we conclude, because the databases reproduce and distribute articles standing alone and not in context, not as part of that particular collective work to which the author contributed, as part of any revision thereof, or as part of any later collective work in the same series. Both the print publishers and the electronic publishers, we rule, have infringed the copyrights of the freelance authors. I A Respondents Jonathan Tasini, Mary Kay Blakely, Barbara Garson, Margot Mifflin, Sonia Jaffe Robbins, and David S. Whitford are authors (Authors). Between 1990 and 1993, they wrote the 21 articles (Articles) on which this dispute centers. Tasini, Mifflin, and Blakely contributed 12 Articles to The New York Times, the daily newspaper published by petitioner The New York Times Company (Times). Tasini, Garson, Robbins, and Whitford wrote eight Articles for Newsday, another New York daily paper, published by petitioner Newsday, Inc. (Newsday). Whitford also contributed one Article to Sports Illustrated, a weekly magazine published by petitioner Time, Inc. (Time). The Authors registered copyrights in each of the Articles. The Times, Newsday, and Time (Print Publishers) registered collective work copyrights in each periodical edition in which an Article originally appeared. The Print Publishers engaged the Authors as independent contractors (freelancers) under contracts that in no instance secured consent from an Author to placement of an Article in an electronic database.1 At the time the Articles were published, all three Print Publishers had agreements with petitioner LEXIS/NEXIS (formerly Mead Data Central Corp.), owner and operator of NEXIS, a computerized database that stores information in a text-only format. NEXIS contains articles from hundreds of journals (newspapers and periodicals) spanning many years. The Print Publishers have licensed to LEXIS/NEXIS the text of articles appearing in the three periodicals. The licenses authorize LEXIS/NEXIS to copy and sell any portion of those texts. Pursuant to the licensing agreements, the Print Publishers regularly provide LEXIS/NEXIS with a batch of all the articles published in each periodical edition. The Print Publisher codes each article to facilitate computerized retrieval, then transmits it in a separate file. After further coding, LEXIS/NEXIS places the article in the central discs of its database. Subscribers to NEXIS, accessing the system through a computer, may search for articles by author,subject, date, publication, headline, key term, words in text, or other criteria. Responding to a search command, NEXIS scans the database and informs the user of the number of articles meeting the users search criteria. The user then may view, print, or download each of the articles yielded by the search. The display of each article includes the print publication (e.g., The New York Times), date (September 23, 1990), section (Magazine), initial page number (26), headline or title (Remembering Jane), and author (Mary Kay Blakely). Each article appears as a separate, isolated story without any visible link to the other stories originally published in the same newspaper or magazine edition. NEXIS does not contain pictures or advertisements, and it does not reproduce the original print publications formatting features such as headline size, page placement (e.g., above or below the fold for newspapers), or location of continuation pages. The Times (but not Newsday or Time) also has licensing agreements with petitioner University Microfilms International (UMI). The agreements authorize reproduction of Times materials on two CDROM products, the New York Times On Disc (NYTO) and General Periodicals On Disc (GPO). Like NEXIS, NYTO is a text-only system. Unlike NEXIS, NYTO, as its name suggests, contains only the Times. Pursuant to a three-way agreement, LEXIS/NEXIS provides UMI with computer files containing each article as transmitted by the Times to LEXIS/NEXIS. Like LEXIS/NEXIS, UMI marks each article with special codes. UMI also provides an index of all the articles in NYTO. Articles appear in NYTO in essentially the same way they appear in NEXIS, i.e., with identifying information (author, title,