What is a collective work?

As defined by the Copyright Act, a collective work is any work which is made up of separate and individual works. For example, a magazine or encyclopedia would be a collective work.

A collective work is one type of a compilation. A compilation is any collection of preexisting materials or data which are arranged in a way that the compiled whole is an original work entitled to its own copyright protection. The difference is that with a collective work, each of the contributed materials is a protectable work on its own, whereas with a compilation, the individual contributions may not necessarily be entitled to copyright protection (for example, if they are already in the public domain).