A contribution to a collective work is an independently copyrightable piece—an essay, photograph, poem, cartoon, chapter, or track—that an author allows a publisher to gather into a larger whole such as a magazine issue, anthology, encyclopedia, journal, or content website. Under 17 U.S.C. § 201(c), the contributor keeps the copyright in that piece, and without a signed transfer the publisher takes only a narrow default privilege to reproduce the contribution as part of that particular collective work, a revision of it, or a later work in the same series. New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), held that dropping freelance articles into a searchable database that serves them up as standalone hits exceeds that privilege, while Faulkner v. National Geographic and the en banc Greenberg held that a faithful, context-preserving digital replica of whole back issues does not. This article maps the statutory definitions, the default allocation of rights, the Tasini line of cases, the work-made-for-hire doctrine that can flip ownership at creation, how to register individual contributions and whole collective works, and how termination lets authors recapture rights decades later. It is written for writers, photographers, editors, publishers, and the lawyers who advise them, with worked hypotheticals throughout.