In the case of New York Times Company, Inc. v. Jonathan Tasini et al., 2000, freelance writers sued The New York Times and other publishers for copyright infringement after their work was included in electronic databases without their permission or compensation. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the freelancers with a 7-2 decision stating that while publishers had rights to print freelance works in newspapers and even archive them as past issues, they did not have the right to sell individual articles separately from the context of the original print publication within an electronic database or redistribute them on CD-ROMs without explicit permission from authors. This landmark ruling established that digital reproduction rights needed to be negotiated separately between publishers and contributors.

In the dissenting opinion for New York Times Company, Inc., et al. v. Jonathan Tasini, et al., Justice Ginsburg disagreed with the majority's view that publishers' reproduction of freelance articles in electronic databases constituted a revision of the original collective work rather than a mere reproduction. She argued that this interpretation was inconsistent with copyright law and its historical context. According to her perspective, when an article is reproduced in an electronic database alongside thousands of other works without any editorial changes or additions, it remains essentially identical to its print version and should be considered as such under copyright law. Furthermore, she contended that freelancers knew their works would be used in various formats when they sold their rights to publishers; therefore these reproductions did not infringe on authors’ copyrights.