Tasini - The Supreme Court Speaks!

As you may already know, on June 25, 2001 the Supreme Court of the United States, in a 7 to 2 landmark decision for creative rights, upheld the plaintiff's victory in the suit by Jonathan Tasini and others against the New York Times Company, Newsday Inc., Time Inc., Lexis/Nexis, and others for copyright infringement.

The facts are fairly simple. The print publishers (New York Times, Newsday and Time) printed in their publications articles written by the plaintiffs, who were freelancers. The plaintiffs were paid for this use but there was no written agreement as to usage rights.

The print publishers then licensed rights to copy and sell the articles to Nexis and others who operate computerized databases containing articles in text-only format obtained from hundreds of periodicals covering many years. Nexis in turn licensed usage rights to subscribers.

Plaintiffs claimed that such use was copyright infringement. The defendants argued that the articles were part of collective works and the databases’ usages were derivative usages permitted under the  copyright act.

The Supreme Court rejected defendants' arguments, holding that the databases reproduced and distributed the articles standing alone and not in the context of the original publication, or as part of the original collective work the author contributed to, or as a revision of the publication, and so did not fall within the statutory definition of a revision.

The Court also rejected the defendants’ "doomsday" arguments, that an infringement finding would have devastating consequences requiring the recall of articles from electronic databases and punching gaping holes in the availability of retrieving historic records. The Court said that the parties could negotiate a reasonable settlement, and there are other models, such as the music industry and elsewhere, to draw upon. It returned the case to the District Court to create a remedy.

Of particular importance was the Court's willingness to uphold copyright infringement on the Internet even if the consequences to the infringement, although speculative, could be severe.

For those who questioned whether intellectual property rights could survive into the new electronic age, the answer is a resounding YES!