A lawsuit that has been winding itself in the courts for 7 years is being heard by U.S. Supreme Court today. Freelance writers are upset that they are not getting enough royalty money from the publications and databases that show their work. The article from The Standard.
\”The case pits the venerable Gray Lady, along with publications such as Sports Illustrated and the Lexis-Nexis database firm, against six freelance writers, led by Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union. The central issue: whether the Times and other publications are obligated to pay freelance authors for electronically redistributing, via a computerized database, such as Nexis.com, or on CD-ROM, work that was originally published in newspapers and magazines.\”
A lawsuit that has been winding itself in the courts for 7 years is being heard by U.S. Supreme Court today. Freelance writers are upset that they are not getting enough royalty money from the publications and databases that show their work. The article from The Standard.
\”The case pits the venerable Gray Lady, along with publications such as Sports Illustrated and the Lexis-Nexis database firm, against six freelance writers, led by Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union. The central issue: whether the Times and other publications are obligated to pay freelance authors for electronically redistributing, via a computerized database, such as Nexis.com, or on CD-ROM, work that was originally published in newspapers and magazines.\”
\”When the case was originally filed in 1993, electronic databases and reproductions were still largely the province of research librarians and special computer terminals. But as the dispute wound its way up to the high court, the popularity of businesses such as Lexis-Nexis has skyrocketed, largely because of the ease of access afforded by the Internet. Currently, 2.2 million subscribers conduct more than 700,000 searches on the database each day, with the majority of searches coming via the Web. On tap are 11,900 databases filled with content from 31,300 sources, including thousands of newspapers and magazines.\”
\”That\’s quite a cash cow for publishers, and freelancers say they just want a fair piece of the action.\”
\”This shows the greed and the arrogance and the disrespect on the part of the industry,\” says Tasini, who is personally involved because of four pieces he wrote that were published in the Times and Newsday. \”These businesses simply do not want to pay writers.\”
\”Tasini says the solution is to track reuses of individual works and compensate authors accordingly, much as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers does for music composers. The National Writers Union has struck a deal with literary database Contentville, establishing a Publications Rights Clearinghouse for freelancers that transfers 30 percent of Contentville\’s download fee whenever a registered freelance piece is accessed via Contentville.\”
\”That model can be extrapolated to other computerized databases. But the publishers in the case, which are supported by a host of companies, from Dow Jones to Knight Ridder (KRI) to the National Geographic Society, say publishing articles through outlets such as Nexis.com qualifies as a \”revision\” of the original work, e.g., of a particular issue of the Times. Thus, say the companies, the Copyright Act of 1976 protects it as part of a publisher\’s collective copyright. The freelancers counter that such redistribution isn\’t merely a revision of the original publication because customers can download articles written over a number of years in any combination they choose.\”
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