New York Times Co. v. Tasini
The Supreme Court ruled that newspaper and magazine publishers infringed freelance writers' copyrights by placing their articles into electronic databases like NEXIS without the writers' consent, because a copyright law provision letting publishers reuse contributions did not cover the way the databases stripped articles of their original context.
The decision means publishers generally need freelancers' permission (or a licensing deal) before reselling their work through searchable databases, reshaping how newspapers, database companies, and freelance writers negotiate digital rights.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled for the publishers; the Second Circuit reversed in the authors' favor; the publishers asked the Supreme Court to review that ruling.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Six freelance writers contributed articles to The New York Times, Newsday, and Sports Illustrated between 1990 and 1993. Their publishing contracts never mentioned electronic databases. The publishers later let LEXIS/NEXIS and University Microfilms International copy all the articles, including the freelancers', into searchable computer databases where each article could be found and read on its own, apart from the newspaper or magazine it originally appeared in.
The question before the Court
Could newspapers and magazines put freelance writers' articles into computer databases like NEXIS without the writers' permission?
Why it matters
Freelance writers gained leverage to demand payment or consent before their work appears in searchable databases, while publishers and database operators like LEXIS/NEXIS faced pressure to renegotiate licensing deals or risk pulling freelance articles from their archives, potentially leaving gaps in digital historical records.
What changes now
The ruling is a final decision on the merits, resolving that the publishers infringed the freelancers' copyrights, but the Court left remedies open for the trial court to decide, including whether an injunction should issue. The Court suggested the parties might instead negotiate licensing agreements to keep articles in the databases while compensating authors, and noted Congress or the courts could later develop broader licensing models for resolving similar disputes.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether an injunction removing the articles from the databases must follow, whether the reuse privilege in Section 201(c) can be transferred between companies, or whether the databases separately violate the authors' right to publicly display their work.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Stevens
“We can be fairly certain, however, that it will provide little, if any, benefit to either authors or readers.”Stevens's closing warning that the ruling would not actually help authors or the public.
Justice Stevens argued that the electronic versions of the New York Times sent to the databases were themselves 'revisions' of the original newspaper because they preserved the publisher's entire editorial selection for that day, even though split into separate files. He reasoned that combining these revisions with other editions in a searchable database did not strip them of that status, since users could still retrieve a full day's edition. He warned the ruling could push publishers to demand full copyright transfers from freelancers and might cause valuable historical databases to purge freelance content, harming researchers and the public without meaningfully benefiting authors.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court examined the Copyright Act's Section 201(c), which gives publishers of collective works like newspapers only a limited privilege to reuse a contributor's article as part of the original collective work, a revision of it, or a later edition in the same series, without needing the author's separate permission.
- The Court focused on how each article actually appears to a user of the databases, reasoning that what matters is whether the database perceptibly presents the article as part of the original publication or a revision of it, not merely whether some data connecting it to that publication is retained.
- Because the databases let users retrieve each article in isolation, stripped of the surrounding newspaper or magazine context, and stored articles alongside millions of others from many different publications, the Court concluded the articles were not being reproduced 'as part of' the original collective work or any revision of it.
- The Court distinguished microfilm and microfiche, which preserve an article's exact position within a full reproduction of the original periodical, from the databases, which offer standalone articles disconnected from that surrounding context.
- The Court rejected the publishers' argument that the ability of a user to manually reconstruct a single edition's worth of articles through a targeted search meant the database itself qualified for the Section 201(c) privilege, holding that the database's own default presentation of articles is what counts.
- Having found no privilege under Section 201(c), the Court concluded that both the print publishers, by authorizing the copying, and the electronic database companies, by carrying it out, infringed the authors' exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute their work.