which display one article at a time but not onto CD-ROMs featuring whole newspapers. This outcome flowed from two key findings which are critical in applying the above reason to the facts in this case. First, the court decided that a database where a user may search for discrete articles is in effect a republication of only an individual article and not of a whole newspaper. Second, the court decided that a CD-ROM in which individual articles may only be viewed in the context of a whole newspaper is not a republication of an individual article as an individual work, but is rather a reproduction of the newspaper as a whole as a work. In other words, Robertson decided that the online database was not a compilation, whereas the CD-ROM was a compilation. When taken to its logical conclusion, this view of the law would seem to be clearly inconsistent with section 2.1(2) because to hold that the copyright owner of the compilation has a positive right to reproduce the compilation necessarily decreases the copyright in the constituent works. The copyright in a constituent element is decreased as soon as the compilation is created because there would come to be no copyright infringement remedy as against the copyright owner of the compilation. Justice Abella's statement in paragraphs 82 and 83 also raises questions because she justifies the grant of positive rights to reproduce compilations based on the reason that the "ability to produce a collective work in the first place depends on the individual authors' authorization to use the materials that form the compilation." In other words, Justice Abella says that it is okay to allow the creators of compilations to reproduce the constituent works that make up the compilations because they probably already have permission to do so from the owners of the copyrights in the constituent works; she is enlisting contract law in support of the grant of a copyright. However, this reasoning is questionable in this particular case. Policy rationales for the decision in Robertson v. Thomson Corp. Even though the reasoning underlying the conclusion in Robertson seems to contradict section 2.1(2) of the Copyright Act, it is possible to justify the outcome on a policy basis. The motivation to ensure that creators of compilations need not obtain permission from each and every copyright holder of the original constituent works is provided by the Tragedy of the