Jerry Greenberg v. National Geographic Society

244 F.3d 1267, 58 U.S.P.Q. 2d (BNA) 1267, 29 Media L. Rep. (BNA) 1599, 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 4270
Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit·Decided March 22, 2001·No. 00-10510·Published·Cited by 2 cases

Opinion

BIRCH, Circuit Judge:

This appeal requires us, as a matter of first impression in this circuit, to construe the extent of the privilege afforded to the owner of a copyright in a collective work to reproduce and distribute the individual contributions to the collective work “as part of that particular collective work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective work in the same series” under 17 U.S.C. § 201(c). 1 In this copyright infringement ease, the district court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, holding that the allegedly infringing work was a revision of a prior collective work that fell within the defendants’ privilege under § 201(c). Because we find that the defendants’ product is not merely a revision of the prior collective work but instead constitutes a new collective work that lies beyond the scope of § 201(c), we REVERSE.

I. BACKGROUND

The National Geographic Society (“Society”) purports to be the world’s largest nonprofit scientific and educational organization at approximately 9.5 million members, and is responsible for the publication of National Geographic Magazine (“Magazine”). Through National Geo *1269 graphic Enterprises, a wholly owned, for-profit subsidiary, the Society also produces television programs and computer software, along with other educational products. In order to acquire photographs for the Magazine and its other publications, the Society hires freelance photographers on an independent-contractor basis to complete specific assignments.

Jerry Greenberg is a photographer who completed four photographic assignments for the Society over the course of 30 years. Photographs from the first three assignments were published in the January 1962, February 1968, and May 1971 issues of the Magazine, respectively. The terms of Greenberg’s employment for these assignments were set out in a series of relatively informal letters. Greenberg received compensation consisting of a daily fee, a fee based on the number of photographs published, and payment of expenses, and in return the Society acquired all rights in any photograph taken on the jobs that was ultimately selected for publication in the Magazine. In 1985, at Greenberg’s request, the Society reassigned its copyrights in the pictures from these three job’s back to Greenberg. Greenberg’s fourth hire for the Society appeared in the July 1990 issue of the Magazine, but the agreement for this job was more detailed than its predecessors. The principle terms of the fourth agreement were similar to those of the first three; however, in this agreement it was explicitly provided that all rights that the Society acquired in the photographs from the job would be returned to Greenberg 60 days after the pictures were published in the Magazine.

In 1996, the Society, in collaboration with Mindscape, Inc., began the development of a product called “The Complete National Geographic” (“CNG”), which is a 30 CD-ROM library that collects every 2 issue of the Magazine from 1888 to 1996 in digital format. There are three components of the CNG that are relevant to this appeal: (1) the moving covers sequence (“Sequence”); (2) the digitally reproduced issues of the Magazine themselves (“Replica”); and (3) the computer program that serves as the storage repository and retrieval system for the images (“Program”).

The Sequence is an animated clip that plays automatically when any disc from the CNG library is activated. The clip begins with the image of an actual cover of a past issue of the Magazine. This image, through the use of computer animation, overlappingly fades (“morphs”) into the image of another cover, pauses on that cover for approximately one second, and then morphs into another cover image, and so on, until 10 different covers have been displayed. One of the cover images used in the moving covers sequence is a picture of a diver that was taken by Greenberg in 1961. The entire sequence lasts for 25 seconds, and is accompanied by music and sound effects.

The collected issues of the Magazine, which are, of course, the CNG’s raison d’etre, were converted to digital format through a process of scanning each cover and page of each issue into a computer. What the user of the CNG sees on his computer screen, therefore, is a reproduction of each page of the Magazine that differs from the original only in the size and resolution of the photographs and text. Every cover, article, advertisement, and photograph appears as it did in the original paper copy of the Magazine. The user can print out the image of any page of the Magazine, but the CNG does not provide a means for the user to separate the photographs from the text or otherwise to edit the pages in any way.

The Program, which was created by Mindschpe, is the element of the software that enables the user to select, view, and navigate through the digital “pages” of the Magazine Replica on the CD-ROM. In creating the Program for the CNG, Minds- *1270 cape incorporated two separate programs: the CD Author Development System (“CDA”), which is a search engine created by Dataware Technologies, Inc.; and the PicTools Development Kit (“PicTools”), which is a program for compressing and decompressing images that was created by Pegasus Imaging Corp. 3 The CNG package contains a “shrink-wrap” license agreement in which “all rights [in the Program] not expressly granted are reserved by Mindscape or its suppliers.” Without the Program, the Replica could still - be stored on a CD-ROM, but the individual “pages” of the Magazine would not be efficiently accessible to the user of the CNG.

Prior to placing the CNG on the market, the Society dispatched a letter to each person who had contributed to the Magazine. This letter informed the contributors about the CNG product and stated the Society’s position that it would not provide the contributors with any additional compensation for the digital republication and use of their works. Greenberg contends that he responded to this notice through counsel and objected to the Society’s use of his photographs in the CNG, but he received no response from the Society.

The Society sought registration for its claim of copyright for the CNG in 1998, but noted 1997 as the year of its completion. On the registration form, 4 the Society indicated that the “nature of authorship” included photographs, text, and an “introductory audiovisual montage.” The Society claimed that the work had not been registered before, but indicated that it was a derivative work, namely a “compilation of pre-existing material primarily pictorial,” to which a “brief introductory audiovisual montage” had been added. No reference was made to, nor was there any disclosure of, the copyrightable Mindscape Program or the two pre-existing, copyrightable sub-programs that it incorporates, all of which are also components of the CNG. The box in which the CNG is packaged and each individual CD-ROM bear the mark “© 1997 National Geographic Society” — indicating the creation of a new work of authorship in 1997.

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Jerry Greenberg v. National Geographic Society, 244 F.3d 1267, 58 U.S.P.Q. 2d (BNA) 1267, 29 Media L. Rep. (BNA) 1599, 2001 U.S. App. LEXIS 4270 (11th Cir. 2001).

244 F.3d 1267 (Jerry Greenberg v. National Geographic Society) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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