Re: Tasini

On 07/06/2000, Sylvie Fodor <s.fodor[_at_]akg.de> wrote:
>
> Can anybody on this forum give any information on the Tasini
> judgement? Did the appeal succeed? When was it appealed?
> Is the judgement available anywhere?
>
> The Tasini case concerns journalists whose text had been published
> without their prior agreement or any remuneration on the web.

More precisely, Tasini involved free-lance journalists [as opposed to newspaper employees] whose contributions to newspapers and magazines (such as the New York Times) were republished without authorization in electronic form in CD-ROMs containing articles from those newspapers and magazines, and in large electronic databases, such as NEXIS.

The District Court held that Section 201(c) of the Copyright Act gave the newspapers and magazines a privilege to republish the articles in electronic form without the authors' consent, because the CD-ROMs and the NEXIS databases were a "revision" of the original collective work. 972 F.Supp. 804 (S.D.N.Y. 1997). That decision was reversed on appeal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which held that neither the CD-ROMs nor the NEXIS databases qualified as "revisions" of the collective work. 206 F.3d 161 (2nd Cir. 1999). The court reasoned that because the only copyrightable element that the publisher added was its original selection and arrangement, any "revision" would have to preserve that selection and arrangement.

Tasini made clear that it was construing only the default provision provided by Sec. 201(c). Publishers and authors may alter the default arrangement by written agreement.

Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School
<tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu> Received on Fri Jul 07 2000 - 23:20:39 GMT