Law Commons^™

Layered Rights: Robertson V. Thomson, Gregory R. Hagen

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

In Robertson v. Thomson Corp., the Supreme Court of Canada (‘‘ the Court ’’) considered ‘‘ whether newspaper publishers are entitled as a matter of law to republish in electronic databases freelance articles they have acquired for publication in their newspapers — without compensation to the authors and without their consent’’. Curiously, while deciding that publishers are not entitled to reproduce the individual articles without the consent of the freelancers, it also held that the publishers do have a right to reproduce the articles in a CD- ROM database ‘‘as a part of those collective works — their newspapers . …