Collective work (US)

A collective work in the Copyright law of the United States is a work that contains the works of several authors assembled and published into a collective whole. The owner of the work has the property rights in the collective work, but the authors of the individual works may retain rights in their contributions. Electronic reproduction of the whole work is allowed, but electronic reproduction of the individual works on their own, outside the context of the work as a whole, may constitute an infringement of copyright.

The Copyright Act of 1976, section 101, defines a collective work as "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". It is protected as long as the "author" can show that the selection and organization of the contributions is original, and that these contribution can themselves be protected, as opposed to being mere facts such as statistical data. The act makes a clear distinction between the collective work and the individual contributions,

Copyright in each separate contribution to a collective work is distinct from copyright in the collective work as a whole and vests initially in the author of the contribution. In the absence of an express transfer of the copyright or of any rights under it, the owner of copyright in the collective work is presumed to have acquired only the privilege of reproducing and distributing the contribution as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective work in the same series.

The United States Copyright Office says,

A compilation or a collective work may be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, provided that it constitutes copyrightable subject matter. As discussed in Section 307, compilations and collective works are a subset of the subject matter categories set forth in Section 102(a) of the Copyright Act, rather than separate and distinct categories of works. ... Thus, a compilation or a collective work must qualify as a literary work; a musical work; a dramatic work; a pantomime or choreographic work; a pictorial, graphic or sculptural work; a motion picture or audiovisual work; a sound recording; and/or an architectural work.

Because a collective work is a form of compilation, the U.S. Copyright Office will apply the criteria for compilations to determine whether the author’s selection, coordination, and/or arrangement satisfies the originality requirement. Thus a website will be protected only if the author used creativity or subjective judgement to select and arrange the material. Ordinarily, the Office will not examine the preexisting material that appears in a derivative work, a compilation, or a collective work to determine whether that material is protected by copyright or whether it has been used in a lawful manner.

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Wikipedia