[cc-community] Does BY-SA extend to a newspaper?

Thinh Nguyen thinh at creativecommons.org
Tue Apr 24 12:34:31 EDT 2007


>Is a newspaper on the whole copyrighted? Or only the individual articles? Is a
>magazine copyrighted?

Yes.  

The copyright in the newspaper is distinct from the copyright of the
individual articles, photographs, and graphics, each of which carry their
own copyright. 

By way of example, under the US Copyright Act (section 103(b))

"The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the
material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the
preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive
right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent
of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or
subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material."

Here are some relevant definitions under the US Copyright Act:

--A ³collective work² is 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.

--A ³compilation² is a work formed by the collection and assembling of
preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged
in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original
work of authorship. The term ³compilation² includes collective works.

NOTE: The CC licenses, such as BY-SA, version 3.0 now use the specially
defined term "Collection"--which has a slightly different definition than
these terms. We no longer use "Collective Work" as a defined term in the
license to avoid potential confusion.





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