In a recent ruling on Faulkner v. National Geographic Enterprises, Inc., the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the digital archives of a print publication represent a “privileged revision” and are not a copyright infringement.

While this was a complex case that addressed several issues, the ruling relevant to digital editions affirms that digital editions, when presented as a collective work and representative of the original print edition, are revisions of previously copyrighted materials just using a different media. In the Faulkner ruling, the co-plaintiffs were freelance authors and photographers whose works appeared in print issues of National Geographic and contended that the digital CD-ROM compilation violated their copyright agreement.

The court ruled that since the digital archive represented the same content, style and a similar layout to the original publication, it is covered as a “privileged revision”. But when National Geographic offered the articles out of context, as stand-alone items, it was outside of their collective works copyright.

You can find a summary of this ruling at:

http://www.lctjournal.washington.edu/Vol3/a001Sivalingam.html