Appeals Court Upholds National Geographic’s Electronic “Revision” Two Federal Appeals Court rulings within the past week have supported National Geographic in their long-running legal battle with freelance photographers over their Complete National Geographic — comprising all of their printed magazines, reproduced exactly in a digital collection. Though sharply divided in a 7-5 vote, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals supported a prior decision in ruling that the digital reproduction is a “collective work” rather than a new one, and NGS can reproduce photographs as part of that work without paying additional royalties. (As opposed to, for example, creating a database […]
