Collective work

A collective work is a work that contains the works of several authors assembled and published under the direction of one natural or legal person who owns the copyright in the work as a whole. Definitions vary considerably from one country to another, but usually treat ownership of the work as a whole as distinct from ownership of the individual contributions, so the individual authors may retain the right to publish their work elsewhere. It is common for publication of articles on the Internet, when isolated from the context of the overall work, to be considered to be outside of the standard agreement between the author and the owner of the collective work.

Many countries have agreed to be bound by the terms of the Berne Convention and/or the TRIPS Agreement.

Article 2.5 of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Paris Text 1971) specifies: "Collections of literary or artistic works such as encyclopaedias and anthologies which, by reason of the selection and arrangement of their contents, constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such, without prejudice to the copyright in each of the works forming part of such collections."

Section 10.2 of the TRIPS Agreement, to which members of the World Trade Organization are bound, states, "Compilations of data or other material, whether in machine readable or other form, which by reason of the selection or arrangement of their contents constitute intellectual creations shall be protected as such. Such protection, which shall not extend to the data or material itself, shall be without prejudice to any copyright subsisting in the data or material itself."

In general, the author of a contribution to a collective work retains the copyright, and the publisher does not have the right to reuse the contribution in some context other than the collective work without the express consent of the author. In England it has been held that exploiting the work of a freelance newspaper photographer in a back numbers website was a use that had not been contemplated in the original license and was not covered by the license. Such reuse would also infringe the journalist's copyright in the United States. In a 1997 case in the Netherlands it was held that reuse of newspaper articles on a website and CD-ROM went beyond the implied license. In Germany any attempt by the author to grant rights to exploit their work in a way that was unknown when the contract was made is null and void under the law. In France, online publication is considered fundamentally different from print publication.

The Creative Commons legal code for Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 (CC2.0) defines a collective work as:

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