The journalists brought the lawsuit in 1993 against the New York Times, Time Inc., and Newsday. Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union and the lead plaintiff in the case, said in response the ruling, "Now it's time for the media industry to pay creators their fair share. Let's sit down and negotiate over this today."

The three publishers had licensed the contents of the papers and magazines to Lexis/Nexis, where individual articles in text format can be retrieved electronically. The publishers argued that they were in compliance with the Copyright Act of 1976, which gives the holder of the copyright for the entirety of an issue the right to reproduce "any revision of that collective work."

In a minority opinion, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer agreed with the publishers that "neither the conversion of the print publishers' collective works from printed to electronic form, nor the transmission of those electronic versions of collective works to the electronic databases, nor even the actions of the electronic databases once they received those electronic versions does anything to deprive those electronic versions of their status as mere 'revisions' of the original collective works."

But the court majority found that unlike microfilm, where the reader can see the article in its original context, someone calling up individual articles from a data base on their computer sees the works "disconnected from their original context."

Since the mid-1990s many publishers have required freelance authors to waive their electronic publishing rights, limiting the overall liability of the publishers in the case. But it is likely the publishers still owe substantial damages to the authors and thousands of others who have joined three class-action lawsuits against providers of electronic data bases, which the court also found liable for copyright infringement.  
 
 
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