Copyright in compilations and collective works is a bit different from copyright in an individual work such as an article or a novel. Under the Copyright Act, a collective work is “a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.”[1] A compilation is “a work formed by the collection and assembling of pre-existing materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”[2]
There are two possible levels of protection for collective works. Take, for example, a compilation of twentieth-century poetry. Let’s call it The 100 Best Poems of the 20th Century. The underlying materials—each individual poem—are protected by copyright. Furthermore, the entire work also may be protected as a copyrightable compilation if the editor exhibited sufficient skill and judgment selecting, organizing and arranging the poems. Here, copyright will extend only to the original material contributed by the editor: the selection and arrangement of the underlying content. Under the Act
The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.[3]
This means that if you want to copy one of the poems from the anthology, then you will need permission from the person who holds copyright in the poem, unless the use is otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act as, say, a fair use. If The 100 Best Poems of the 20th Century is also protected as a compilation, someone who wants to copy a significant number of its poems may need to get permission from whomever has copyright in it as a compilation, generally the editor or the publisher.
