BCLP Team Authors Article for ‘Communications Lawyer’

Atlanta Managing Partner Eric Schroeder, along with Associates Brian Underwood and Nick Bedo, co-authored an article in the summer edition of Communications Lawyer. The three discuss the 2001 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483, in which the Court ruled that freelance journalists retained copyrights for their individual articles of a collective work and that in the absence of written agreements, publishers could not license the simple text of such articles to computer databases without infringing the author’s rights, if the articles were not presented as part of a collection of the publishers’ work. This decision helped generate a market shift where publishers carefully negotiated and documented the rights for digital publication and led to the modern-day rights-and-clearances departments for many news media legal departments. Communications Lawyer is a publication of the ABA Forum on Communications Law.