-Caveat Lector- http://www.washtech.com/news/media/8603-1.html Freelance Writers Fight for Share of Online Profit By Christopher Stern, Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 27, 2001; 11:51 PM Freelance writers, among the lowest-paid and least powerful figures in the literary world, will face off today in the U.S. Supreme Court against some of the biggest and richest media companies. The writers claim that publishers have illegally plundered their work for the past 20 years by selling their articles—without permission—to electronic databases and CD-ROM companies. At the center of the legal debate are several hundred thousand articles that first appeared in newspapers and magazines and now are being sold in electronic forms. The freelancers argue that they should be paid for the electronic recycling of their work. The publishers say they already compensated the authors and should not have to pay twice for the same material. “The publishers all honestly believed they had paid fully for the rights to include these articles in the paper edition, the microfilm edition and the edition that gets published electronically,” said Bruce P. Keller, a lawyer for the publishers. The Supreme Court arguments cap a seven-year battle between the freelancers and leading publishers, including the New York Times, Newsday and Time, the magazine division of AOL Time Warner Inc. Other big media companies, including The Washington Post Co. and Gannett Co., have filed legal papers in support of the publishers. Lexis/Nexis, a database company, and University Microfilms International, which produces CD-ROMs, are also defendants. The dispute is part of a wide-ranging battle over copyright laws. The laws were written in an era of ink and paper but now are being challenged by digital technology that allows anyone with an Internet connection and a computer to copy huge amounts of information and send it anywhere in the world. Peter Jaszi, a law professor at American University, said the case before the Supreme Court has similarities to the legal fight between the major music companies and Napster, the online music site, which has allowed users to download songs without the permission of the copyright owners. In both cases, “we are struggling to adapt rules written in an analog environment to a digital environment,” Jaszi said. Jaszi filed a legal brief in support of the writers on behalf of the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries. The legal case chiefly turns on the question of whether the databases and CD-ROMs are “revisions” of the original publication, or an entirely new product. Copyright law allows the sale of revisions of original material without additional compensation to an author. Freelancer Jonathan Tasini, who filed the writers’ case in 1993, disputes the publishers’ claim that the electronic copies of freelance articles are just another edition of the original publication, and therefore not subject to additional fees. Working with a database, a user can search for an individual story or group it with similarly themed articles from other publications. In effect, the user can create an entirely new product from a variety of sources and authors, said Tasini, now the president of the New York-based National Writers Union. The marketplace has come to much of the same conclusion, Tasini said. Look at how it treats such databases compared with how it deals with material copied to microfilm—which creates an exact copy of the original publications, but in a non-digital, hard-to-copy form. “With microfilm, you walk in to a library and scroll through it for free. With Lexis-Nexis, you have to pay a lot of money,” Tasini said. He thinks it is time for freelancers to benefit from that extra revenue. The publishers won the first round of the case in 1997, when a federal judge in New York ruled that the databases are essentially revisions of publications in electronic archives. That decision was unanimously overturned in 1999 by the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, which ruled that a database containing thousands of periodicals can “hardly be deemed a revision of each edition of every periodical it contains.” Last week, a federal appeals court in Atlanta decided a similar case in favor of a photographer who contended that the National Geographic Society had illegally used his pictures on a CD-ROM without his permission. The court found that National Geographic had “created a new product, in a new medium, for a new market that far transcends any privilege of revision or other mere reproduction envisioned” by copyright law. Should the writers prevail before the Supreme Court, the database companies would be forced to erase hundreds of thousands of articles and pictures from their electronic files, creating a huge hole in the historical record, said Keller, the lawyer for the publishers. “It is a 20-year record of history that is going to be gutted,” Keller said. Publishers would have no choice but to delete the material, because they would otherwise be liable for copyright infringement, he said. The publishers have lined up several historians, including Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, and the filmmaker Ken Burns to support the view that a victory for the writers would be a blow to historians seeking access to the databases. In response, the writers have lined up their own set of writers and historians to support their side, including Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder. The library associations support the writers, despite the claim that a victory could create a hole in the historical record. “We are concerned about a potential gap, but there are ways around this,” said Miriam Nisbet, legislative counsel for the American Library Association. Among the proposals to solve the problem is using a registry for copyrighted articles similar to the registries for copyrighted music. Tasini has already started such a registry aimed at creating a copyright licensing system for authors. Even if the publishers decide to delete freelance stories from databases, the material would still be available on microfilm and in their original form in libraries, Nisbet said. “It’s not like the information is going to disappear from the face of the earth,” Nisbet said. © 2001 The Washington Post Company ================================================================= Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT FROM THE DESK OF: *Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends ================================================================= <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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