Copyright Ruling May Create Memory Hole 105
dublin writes: "C|Net's News.com reports that the recent US Supreme Court decision granting freelance writers stronger control over distribution of their work (a la RIAA) will result in the removal of large chunks of archived internet content from a large number of sites. The article reports that this will eliminate about 8-10% of the content at large publishers' sites. Will this marginalize freelance writers in favor of staff flacks more interested in the company line than the truth, concentrating even more power in the hands of the media moguls? What are the implications of that much content disappearing down the memory hole without a trace?" I bet a lot of lawyers are recasting boilerplate for future contracts about now, too.
Re:This is a Good Thing (Score:2)
Re:a new twist (Score:3)
This was argued extensively when DejaNews first surfaced. The resolution was that (1) Usenet posts are 'published for distribution' by intent - you wouldn't have put it into Usenet if you didn't want it distributed in a public manner; (2) Usenet distribution takes a number of forms, some of which are time-delayed (for a while there was Usenet distribution by backup tape to sites that didn't have network connectivity, for one extreme example), DejaNews is just another distribution mechanism; (3) You can exempt yourself with the X-No-Archive header; (4) your copyright still holds, you just gave Usenet permission to distribute.
...phil
Already done (Score:2)
I've been freelancing for about two and a half years now - every contract I see has a clause that covers all media.
This really isn't a big deal except for authors with contracts that are several years old.
As for replacing freelancers with staffers - not bloody likely. It costs a lot more to hire talented staffers than it does to contract articles. You also get less variety by using staffers.
I'm happy about the ruling, but it isn't going to change the way business is being done now - publishers probably changed their contracts as soon as wind of this suit got out in the first place. They'd be foolish to keep doing the same old thing and wait for the court to rule - it's better to protect yourself from the start.
As an author you just have to decide what your work is worth, how likely it is that you'll be able to resell it if you have the rights, and whether you have enough pull to get something better than the standard contract. Just like any other industry - if you don't have much pull, you're probably going to get gouged on a few deals before you have enough clout to say "hey, people really want to read my stuff so you're going to have to bend a little."
few points (Score:1)
At the risk of sounding redundant, I'd like to point out that this is a win for the content creators, aka the little people or the average Joe, possibly us. Others have pointed out that it only affects articles written in the early 90's.
And I'd like to specifically mention the huge gap between "al la RIAA" where the content creator does not retain the rights to his work and this decision. IMNSHO the RIAA should be crushed so that a more fair (artist friendly) system can take its place.
Re:few points (Score:1)
I believe the newspapers/etc. would have started the practice of having you sign such lovely contracts even if the court decision went "against them". With every new advancement there is a lag time before the government passes laws dealing with it and lawyers gain a new revenue stream.
That the author's works were now in databases being reproduced as in Lexis/Nexis for a fee was a change in technology that they hadn't bargained on. Microfiche (btw: I've just read Brian's opinion on his site), being freely available and not subject to the ease of access an online resource, is what the authors were used to dealing with. The web has changed the publishing dynamic.
Brian (see his site), I applaud you for turning down the contract. If a significant number of authors do so then the newspapers will be at a bargaining disadvantage. With the usage tracking capabilities of computers, authors could negotiate for royalties on further reproductions of their work instead of accepting the current contract. That possibility does seem rather unlikely given the lack of competition of a few media giants vs. many small independent companies.
gift culture doesn't work everywhere (Score:1)
Web exposure == free advertising == increased name recognition == increased print sales.
I'm also not sure your formula is applicable here; people buy the NY Times no matter who's in there. Since there are so many articles by different people you're probably not buying it for one particular author, and those authors are probably not paid more if sales go up, so it doesn't necessarily help them at all.
I happen to be quite fond of ramen noodles (throw out the little pseudo-flavor packet, makes a gret side dish with any meal!)
Whaddaya mean throw out the flavor packet?! How else do you get that great sodium buzz?
You get the rights you pay for. (Score:1)
The copyrights to the freelance articles in question were not owned by the media companies -- they were not 'works for hire'. Rather, they bought specific rights, and only those rights, to the works.
The media companies' argument was 'If a new way to use an article we bought comes up, we have an automatic right to use it that way, too, even though we didn't pay for it. The only limits on what we can do with the work were those things thought of at the time that we didn't buy'.
Rather an iffy argument, that.
Memory hole is not necessary (Score:3)
No, there's not going to be a memory hole.
First off, the contracts from the about '94 on (or even earlier) included Internet rights. But many organizations with big databases of older articles charge for access, so it's worth money for them to have these articles. Meanwhile, freelance writers always could use more money.
So what will happen now is that the major database holders will negotiate a settlement with the free lancers, and they have an incentive to do so. If you don't make a deal and your competitors do, researchers who pay several dollars per article to track down old stuff will go to your competitors.
Re:Not a memory hole. (Score:1)
Yes, there is a statute of limitations. It's called copyright, which runs between 50 and 75 years depending on territory.
After that, do what thou wilt with the content.
Slashdot's memory hole (Score:1)
Course, we could try the ruling out on this...
Re:Not a memory hole. (Score:1)
This of course, being what I meant (although i think some of the more obscure forms of copyrights are from the date of creation)
Re:Greed poisons the well... (Score:3)
Don't be absurd. We generally don't get any more money from Internet distribution contracts.
In my time as a writer I have signed contracts that forbid me to publish my work on Mars (all Earth territories and beyond I think was the phrase): did they pay me extra for my lost Martian readership? Nah...
I haven't got a penny extra, for any variation or extension in an IP contract. Why? I'm not Tom Wolfe, at a guess. I write reviews and features for computer magazines, which is the kind of thing the vast majority of these affected freelances do. It's low paid transient work (although it does have its benefits - working college student hours is one of the more obvious ones)
Beautiful Irony, that.
Just as an aside: Does anyone have any theories as to why the 'gift culture' model doesnt seem to apply at all to the arts world? You'd think freelancers would appreciate the online exposure (it's basically free advertising, which can lead to further work for the print rags, but no one seems to see it that way).
Yeah. It doesn't lead to more work. Danny O'Brien at NTK made a living by parlaying his webzine experience into features and columns for real magazines but he's the only example I can think of, and I know he didn't make as much money as he could have as NTK was so much work. (Plus which, Danny is a good writer and would have probably got that work without NTK).
We spend our copious free time as freelancers ringing people up begging for more work, invoicing and doing accounts. You know, work stuff.
That's what its all about. Pay or get lost. (Score:2)
Re:meanwhile at slashdot ... (Score:1)
Re:Hard copies in decline (Score:1)
[from the bottom of the linked page] This title is also available as an e-book.
Kind of ironic, don't you think?
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Re:I used to work for Rupert Murdoch (Score:1)
my claim that the mechanism of media bias goes largely unexplained by those that bring it up in conversation obviously neglects linguistics professors and political economists. sorrrieee!
and spelling correction rebuttals are BS ad hominem attacks.
I used to work for Rupert Murdoch (Score:4)
yes, you read that subject right. i used to work as a journalist for K. Rupert Murdoch, of News Corp. fame. i've heard many accusations of bias in large corperate media institutions, but never do i hear a theory for how this actually occurs. do editors lean over the shoulders of writers and tell them to bias the news in corperate news organizations? the answer is no. here's the real skinny:
on everyone's desk at the Fox News Channel, the New York Post and other News Corp. properties is a Pilsbury Doughboy-sized replica of Rupert himself that watches your every move. any time you consider writing about things like the WTO protesters, Ralph Nader, or fluffy bunny rabbits, the Rupert replica will cluck his tounge or shake his head dissaprovingly.
this is why i enjoy being a freelance writer now, because i don't have to labor under the Rupert's watchful gaze.
seriously, does anyone think there's a difference between freelance and full-time journalists? the copy gets worked over by the same editors anyway.
Re:Greed poisons the well... (Score:2)
At any rate -- I expect this to effect larger companies (like the New York Times) much more than smaller periodicals. Most writers writing for small magazines in fact probably will be happy to give on-line publishing rights for free or for cheap. But frankly I don't have a lot of sympathy for large newspaper companies which are currently enjoying the largest profits ever at the expense of the writers and editors that work for them. If writers can squeeze some money out of these companies (who are much more greedy than the writers are), I say more power to them.
BTW -- there are plenty of artists and writers who do share their work for free. But at some point everyone has to make a living.
Re:Greed poisons the well... (Score:3)
Seriously what you say makes no sense. Exactly what source of income did they destroy? Oh the websites that pay them exactly nothing for the use of their work.
The reason why the 'gift culture' model doesn't apply to writers is because writers have to actually make a living from what they would be giving away. And freelancers are still free to give away their work (and many will continue to do so) -- companies like the New York Times just can't do it for them against their will.
Recasting boilerplate about now??? (Score:1)
This was always a case about old articles (1980s and earlier), not current ones.
Re:Issues (Score:2)
Does removal wipe out their obligations or simply mean that they have a stopped rather than ticking clock in terms of financial obligations.
We knew about this long ago . . . (Score:2)
The result was really a no-brainer, as the Supreme Court opinion showed. The only surprise to me was that the Supreme Court agreed to grant certiorari in the first place.
The issue wasn't whether the content would be made available, but only who would benefit from its being made available.
In short, the predictions made by the media folk in Tasini (utterly discounted by the high Court) were the same hysterical remarks made previously by the RIAA and the MPAA in their respective cases. Such rants get a jump out of District Court judges, it would appear, but at least one pair of courts seemed to be unimpressed in the face of a clear contract and a clear statute.
Re:Contracts have changed already (Score:1)
Da-da-dummy. Ta-ta-troll. So the public out there was waiting to see if major media companies would get away with ripping off freelancers before deciding whether to trade articles online? That's stretching things pretty far into stupid just to call a completely unrelated group of people illiterate. A better question would be how many major media execs can remember anything before 1995.
I won't even touch your Metallica comment (except to say that I am controlling your mind and smashing your dreams), but I can only guess it means you are one of those pretentious twits who listen to classical puke or jazz scrapings because it's supposed to be sophisticated, or you are one of those stunted literalists who think that written music represents actual music. Don't trip over your shoelaces trying to answer me.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Scare Tactics (Score:2)
Look, I'm a library science student, and if anyone has an interest in ensuring the most complete archives, it's librarians. Just before oral arguments, the American Library Association issued a supporting brief on the side of the writers.
All this ruling says is that archives must get the freelancers' PERMISSION before putting the work into an archive. Authors and authors' estates don't want their work to be forgotten (and might even like the royalties), so are even now joining groups which will negotiate with the archives on their behalf. [Remember, the plaintiff in this case was National Writers' Union .
The reason for the complaint was not that freelancers didn't want to be in the archive at all. The problem was that freelancers were being hurt trying to resell their work (either in book collections or just to other papers/magazines) because of how quickly the work was available by aggregators which may have their own resale agreements with clients. In other words, someone could obtain rights to an article from the aggregator (say, New York Times) without an extra cent going to the original author.
That was just wrong, and that's what the court ruled against.
This is a Good Thing (Score:4)
Here's an interesting question (Score:2)
As has been pointed out, electronic media is very volatile, allowing not just access to information but destruction of information on a huge scale.
My $.02
Re:All it says (Score:2)
Although the CNet article seems to treat it as a given ("But at least one federal appeals court panel has tried to fight worries about incomplete archives. In ruling that National Geographic violated a freelance magazine photographer's rights by including his images in a CD-ROM, the panel asked a lower court to order the magazine to pay him rather than pull the photos."), evidently the question of whether electronically-stored versions of entire publications are included or not is still in question [nytimes.com] ("National Geographic said today that it would soon file an appeal to the Supreme Court from a ruling by the federal appeals court in Atlanta, which said that a 30-disc CD-ROM set that reproduced every page of every issue of the magazine was a new work rather than a revision, even though each article appeared in its original context.")
The tender concern of the publishers for the freelance writers is oh, so precious:
Of course, it is up to the publishers whether to delete the articles or pay for what they took. Apparently the publishers consider themselves to be paternally "assisting" the freelancers to come to the decision that is best for them, the option they already have to notify the publishers that it is all right for them to include their work in such databases if they wish. How considerate of them. Yeah, sure.Extension to Sturgeon's Law (Score:2)
Out of the 10% of everything that isn't shit, 90% of that 10% is shit compared to the remaining 10%. And so on.
I modestly propose that this extension be called "Sturgeon's law of Relativity".
More seriously, I suspect that the overall financial return follows the same law: 90% of anything is paid shit compared to the remaining 10%, et cetra...
My own experience is that art that is free is generally shit (except in the eyes of the artist). The same applies to government subsidized art, except that in this case, it goes all the way past worthless, and isn't worth shit.
Re:Extension to Sturgeon's Law (Score:2)
More like the 90/10 law that explains why cluttered desks represent productive employees, which is that 10% of the documents are the ones you need 90% of the time, 10% of that 10% (1 percent) represents docs you need 90% of that 90% of the time and so on. For a few levels at least.
Re:Greed poisons the well... (Score:1)
Greed poisons the well... (Score:2)
Beautiful Irony, that.
Just as an aside: Does anyone have any theories as to why the 'gift culture' model doesnt seem to apply at all to the arts world? You'd think freelancers would appreciate the online exposure (it's basically free advertising, which can lead to further work for the print rags, but no one seems to see it that way).
:Michael
Re:All it says (Score:2)
Of course, and as usual, you can't tell that from the way the opening paragraph is written on slashdot, which makes it sound like civilization is doomed and information database services everywhere will be brought to their knees because they can't archive an article that was written last week...
Re:All it says (Score:1)
I don't see this as changing the way the media companies do their work. The lawyers will work this out!
Re:Library...? (Score:3)
In this case, if there is no paper copy of a publication in a library, and the library relied on the electronic database, the worry is real.
This of course also raises the question on whether paying users of these databases can get a refund, since they don't have access to the content they were promised.
Re:Um, what about where it is legal? e.g., Taiwan. (Score:1)
I don't see RedHat protesting that they're losing revenue due to CheapBytes cranking out copies of their CD distribution and undercutting them?
Sure, Linux is free and the music supposedly isn't.... that's not really my point here. I'm just saying the result is similar. The market ends up being big enough for all the players - counterfeiters/cloners and those who sell the "real deal". Some folks just want a copy of the media as cheap as possible, while others want to support the brand/artist/author. Still others will pay more to have the "original" with manuals/support, or liner notes/top-quality CD media.
If you want to severely reduce counterfeiting/cloning of your intellectual property, just price it right! Taking to the courts is a losing battle in the long run, but people just can't seem to grasp that. To eliminate a weed, you need to pull it out by the roots. Don't keep cutting the top off of it instead....
Re:Not a memory hole. (Score:2)
If someone were to make it into a law that picking your nose while walking in an office hallway is illegal and punishable by 50$/violation payable to the ceo of the company in question in cash before dawn it certainly wouldn't enable them to make up for the lost ipo-millions by looking at the past security camera tapes..
However any current and future violators would have to pay up or they might choose to cease their illegal practices such as picking ones nose(or publishing copyrighted works without proper compensation). It seems that a lot of them are choosing the latter option..
Check out the Publication Rights Clearinghouse (Score:3)
As an occasional freelance journalist (an index of my writing can be found on my homepage [fhwang.net],) I'm a member of this union, and I'm actually quite proud of that.
Re:I used to work for Rupert Murdoch (Score:1)
Spending too much time writing to actually do any reading, I guess? For a pretty well documented account of how this happens, start here [commoncouragepress.com].
cluck his tounge
the copy gets worked over by the same editors
At least the editors know how to spell, I hope.
--Seen
Re:few points (Score:2)
copyright protection expires (Score:1)
Others have pointed out that the hole doesn't cover most material from the past five years (due to appropriately revised agreements). It's also worth noting that the memory hole for stuff prior to that won't be permanent. Copyright protection lasts a long time, but it does expire. The details are slightly involved:
The LOC on how long copyright lasts [loc.gov]Re:Here's an interesting question (Score:2)
The answer is its no different then when publishers pulp their dead invantory.
It not "book burniong" unelss you start making OTHERS legitimate copies of the books illegal or put other rpessure on thsoe owners to destroy them.
Gotta love them slash-colored glasses.
Re:no, the other limit. (Score:2)
Not quite. AFAIK, the statute of limitations doesn't work quite that way. What it says is that if an offense happened long enough ago you can't sue for it. But from the standpoint of copyright infringement the offense happens continuously as long as the copyrighted content is available. So you'd lose your right to sue only if the content was displayed, then removed, and the appropriate time had elapsed since the removal. As long as the copyrighted content is still being displayed, there's still a cause for action. IIRC, if you keep it continuously available that also extends the right to sue for as long as it has been available, even if the statute of limitations would have expired for the time at which it was first available.
It's in the hands of the freelancers (Score:2)
From what I understand, most contracts written today do include terms about collecting work in digital collections and archives. However, this ruling goes back in time and will force publishers to negotiate terms to display freelance work in these mediums. This may or may not force the removal of older work. If I was a writer who had some freelance stuff published years ago, chances are I've moved on and continued to be a freelance hack, or gotten a staff position or something else. If I'm still writing I'd want copies of my previous good work floating around as a way to entice people to read my current stuff. I dunno how many people would see it this way, but for nonfiction work that's four or more years out of date, it'd be hard to justify its relevance to anyone but scholars--lay or academic. And, I'd certainly want to be a help to these people, especially if they cite me. Fiction on the other hand is fairly timeless and I'd most certainly want to compensation for making that permanently and freely available. I hope that freelance journalists and their kin would step up to the larger cause of knowledge and give permission grant permission for their older works to be collected into online archives.
no, the other limit. (Score:1)
Re:a new twist (Score:1)
Re:no, the other limit. (Score:1)
All it says (Score:2)
Probably, this will only effect the articles written over 4 years ago (before the internet became a household item).
a new twist (Score:2)
You are now in a series of twisty little passages.....
Not a memory hole. (Score:3)
If the company must pay for the period that is on-line already, why not keep it further.
Since this issue has been around since 1993, the number of post 1993 contracts w/o internet included will be small.
There may be a statute of limitations question on items written before 1994. If it was posted in 1994, the time may have run. It may a publsher company from now posting their pre-1994 pieces, if they have not done so already. Keep in mind, there is one appeals court that said that a photo could not be taken down, but it had to be paid for -- since it had already been published in violation.
Re:Not a memory hole. (Score:1)
Perhaps because it isn't worth it? I actually work at Lexis-Nexis (although I'm just a lowly programmer, and no, I'm not speaking for the company); there are many good reasons to support the plaintiff's case, but one overriding reason why they'll never see a cent from their efforts -- the market won't support it.
People spend money on the Lexis-Nexis service because of the depth and quality of our databases. We literally have decades worth of archived newspapers, magazines, technical journals, legislation, and court documents. Consider the effort it takes just to maintain relationships with the thousands of publishers of these documents. Now, we are to be forced to treat each individual freelance newspaper story as a separate relationship with each author? I've heard there may be more than 10,000 of these stories already archived!
Nah, I can't believe that Lexis-Nexis will ever make a serious attempt to contact thousands of authors individually to try and negotiate a contract; we'll just have to purge them from the system. I can't really imagine any other online database company trying to accomplish that either. They'd never be able to make up the cost of the time it took to manage all those relationships, even if the authors allowed free use of their works.
John
Re:What will happen to the index data? (Score:1)
Well, I'm not anywhere near this issue in the company, but I would assume that (using your example) if you pull up "page 23" of the NYT, 3/9/87, there should be some indication that an article previously residing in that position is no longer there.
The problem is, that isn't how people use online databases. The value of the Nexis system (or any database system) is its ability to search the content of those millions of documents and quickly return matches to you. A content-based search is not going to find an article that is now lacking all content.
Also, the people who use this system don't generally have the time to amble on down to the local library to read the documents that are returned. Think about how you use a Google search (or whatever internet search system you prefer); generally, a simple search will return hundreds of documents, and you'll generally need to check several of them by hand before you really find what you're looking for. The search is only useful because you can get to those documents almost instantly; if it took a 15 minute trip to check those documents, you'd never do it. Now, the Nexis search system has some additional features that allow users to configure a search more accurately than is generally possible with Google/etc., but realistically any researcher is going to need to pare down the results of a search by hand.
Yes, this isn't a "Memory Hole", but it isn't nothing; it does severely impair the indexing of that data, and even if you could find it, integrating on-line searching with physical documents is not an optimal way of working.
--John
Re:Library...? (Score:1)
In this case, if there is no paper copy of a publication in a library, and the library relied on the electronic database, the worry is real.
well, in the case of newspapers and news magazines like NYT and Time, i'll bet there's still microfilm of the issues covered by this ruling, if there's not paper copy (which there may well be in a lot of cases).
as for electronic journals, if you're talking about academic/professional journals, this ruling will be irrelevant to most if not all of those. authors rarely get paid in anything but free copies or offprints for those journals, anyway.
Re:Library...? (Score:1)
And what about physical damage? You can make off-site backups if the periodicals are kept on disk, but hardcopies have no such protection from fire or flood or any other distaster that can befall the average public library. Then you'd have to send patrons who want articles from lost materials to another library, or place an order for it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't continue stocking periodicals, just that a library is not the perfect archival system. Just look at the Library of Alexandria.
IIRC... (Score:1)
If I recall correctly, freelance contracts were changed back in the 80's to include electronic databases and such. This doesn't affect current news & events because it's already taken care of in contracts. This really only affects stories out of history The previous coverage of this case. [slashdot.org]
Affect on the past will be greater than the effect on the future.
Re:Not a memory hole. (Score:1)
Most jurisdictions now run copyright for "author's lifetime plus X". X = 70 in the U.S., and I believe that's the value for most of Europe as well.
Court gets two birds with one stone! (Smart Tags) (Score:1)
How efficient of the Court! They have helped authors avoid two completely separate kinds of copyright infringement with one stroke. The first is obvious, companies publishing authors' work without their permission.
The second is saving thousands of works from being (unlawfully?) altered by Microsoft's just-released Smart Tags [manilasites.com] feature, er, bug? (ah, parasite!)
How to fix Smart Tags [manilasites.com]
Re:Memory Hole? (Score:1)
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off coffee drinking
Re:Memory Hole? (Score:2)
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off coffee drinking
Contracts have changed already (Score:2)
Presumably we will see similar things to Napster, where people can scan in printed articles and share them without paying for them. That is, assuming metallica fans like to read.
Re:Extension to Sturgeon's Law (Score:1)
A = Something .1% of A .01% of A
B = 10% of A that is not shit = 10% of A
C = 10% of B that is not shit = 1% of A
D = 10% of C that is not shit =
E = 10% of D that is not shit =
. . .
Since it is a limit we will never actually reach the point where A is 100% shit. But your extension comes as close as possible to saying everything is shit. Kinda pessimistic if you ask me.
Um, what about where it is legal? e.g., Taiwan. (Score:2)
In other nations copying is seen as no more illegal than unlimited video renting which is illegal in other nations without paying %age of each rental to IP holder.
Son May records in Taiwan makes a living selling copied CDs/DVDs/VCDs/etc for cheap, usually minus all the booklets, goodies, etc. They are a legal locally licensed business. They pay taxes. They employ locals. They are doing nothing illegal. And they feel the same about complaints from self proclaimed moralists as EBAY or Yahoo does about French bitching over "illegal sale of Nazi artifacts". Pot. Kettle. Black. BTW, "Taiwan" could not sign treaties anyway since the UN does not recognize Taiwan as a separate nation. That decision is for China to make.
Today, the internet thrusts all nations local laws into one arena. So what happens when some "freelancer" sets up a legal archive of elsewhere copyrighted software is set up on a server in Taipei? Servers in Taiwan access just as easily as servers elsewhere. What will IP advocates do? Firewall an entire nation? That would cause more harm than good.
IP is a dinosaur. Just like people can no longer "own" the rights to drill for oil in their backyard, the idea of "Intellectual Property" will soon be obsolete. Oh, and as for the argument that the death of IP will mean no one creating new content, look at Taiwan's music industry. Plenty of local artists, yes? Some of them are very cool, and living an extravagant lifestyle despite no IP law.
They can publish it themselves (Score:2)
Still to be seen is if people will go to freelancer's websites though.
Freelance vs. Staff "Flacks" (Score:2)
Timothy must've put on his JonKatz pants on when he wrote:
Why should we assume that freelance writers are any more interested than the truth than a staff writer?
*Both* are going to be concerned with their careers. The staff writer's career is more tied to the bottom line of the company he works for, but the freelance writer's bottom line is tied to his career, which is dependent not just on truthful and accurate reporting, but also such corrupting factors as sensationalism, bias, and pandering (either to advertising sponsors or to the audience they're trying to reach.)
Don't get me wrong, I do believe that freelance writing tends to be of a somewhat higher quality than staff writing (Why would you buy an article from an outside source if your own staff could do it just as good or better? How could a freelance writer manage to have a career if he could do no better than a staff writer tied to a [sometimes marginally] more stable job?)
But freelancing is not a quick-fix, magic-pill guarantee that reporting/writing will be accurate, free of bias or misleading omissions or disortions. There is nothing that can guarantee that.
You have to actually go in and read each article and judge it for yourself, testing the claims, assertions, judgments, and conclusions.
It takes real work, and there are no non-trivial generalized solutions. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Re:Not a memory hole. (Score:1)
Copyright reformists are counting this as a victory, but I can't see it that way. EVERYBODY involved in this one loses. The publishers, the freelancers, and, most of all, any researchers that might want to use those archives.
They didn't even win anything for the Freelancers since the contracts have since been changed to allow for electronic publication.
Perhaps, if the Judgement demanded that the publishers pay up, then it might be a victory, but not when they have the choice of removing the works and paying nothing.
Re:copyright protection expires (Score:1)
And that is assuming that Disney will allow copyright to expire. Expect them to be back in 2018 for another 20 year extension and in 2038 and in 2058 and in 2078.
Copyright is supposed to be for 'limited times.' Current copyright is only limited on a cosmic scale - 150 years is a drop in the bucket compared to infinity, but it isn't limited where a human lifespan is concerned. There is no realistic limit on anything created during your lifetime because you will NEVER see it in the Public Domain.
You can't count on copyright expiration to recover the articles that will likely be lost when removed from the archives.
Re:meanwhile at slashdot ... (Score:1)
I appreciate the irony, and feel the same way.
I am at a loss to understand /.'s behavior here.
Freelancing could change for the worse (Score:1)
You only need to look at newspaper or television to see what crap the will put in just to fill up on content.
Re:Freelancing could change for the worse (Score:1)
or say should I Yup'er
difference between microfilm and lexis/nexis (Score:1)
Say you, Alice, write a sports article that appears on page 7 of today's paper, and your fellow reporter Bob writes a politics article that appears on page 9. Someone buying the paper gets both articles on paper along with other articles by Charlie (cooking), Dave (pet care), etc. Sometime later, a library buying a microfilm edition of that day's paper gets all those articles on film. The microfilm product has the same contents as the paper and falls the revised product clause.
With Lexis/Nexis, the publisher now gets to charge for each article separately. Someone searching for Alice's article doesn't get Charlie's. The publisher suddenly has a vastly larger number of revenue streams (one for each article in the paper, instead of for each issue in the paper) but the author's revenue stream hasn't changed at all.
The solution I'd like to see (and pigs will fly) is for Lexis/Nexis to just deliver index info for the paper, not individual articles. And then you should be able to download the entire issue of that day's paper (i.e. all the articles, not just the one you were searching for) for a single charge. That shouldn't increase user costs too much, for the simple reason that most users won't be willing to pay a whole lot to access additional articles that they weren't looking for. But for those of us who like to build up our own archives, it makes it much cheaper to acquire articles in bulk.
That seems like a much better guardian against the "memory hole" than having centralized vendors doling out one article at a time.
What will happen to the index data? (Score:2)
Re:meanwhile at slashdot ... (Score:1)
(W Gibson)
Library...? (Score:3)
-S
Amusing, but they're still hacks.... (Score:1)
This is not to say I don't feel hacks shouldn't be paid for their work. Like all factory workers, the faceless scribes who fill up such bastions of culture as Salon and People Magazine deserve their shekels, but one has to wonder if they should be paid twice for something that was of dubious value to begin with. After all, pieceworkers get paid only once for their toil.
Re:Extension to Sturgeon's Law (Score:1)
I haven't had the same experience, but then again, I've so rarely seen art that wasn't self-consciously commercial. I remember a debate years ago in the Comics Journal about whether or not the Sistine Chapel was commericial art, and if it was, did that invalidate Michaelangelo's inspiration. Even though the work WAS commissioned, his talent, as staggering as it was, was not: he invested his great gift in the work, over and above any price that could have been placed on what he produced. The same could be said of Beethoven: his art was primary, and he had to suffer fools to get paid for it. Hopefully without sounding too much like an elitist snob, I firmly believe that material created strickly for pay rarely has any value, least of all to the artist. (Mozart might be an exception
The same applies to government subsidized art, except that in this case, it goes all the way past worthless, and isn't worth shit.
I would argue that, politically, all art today DOES come from the government, or at least is subsidized by it, if indirectly. Even Piss Christ serves a function for the state: it creates a maelstrom of controversy about a non-issue when there's much more important things to be angry about. I think it was Plato who wanted to deny the masses art because it would corrupt the Polis. Imagine how he must be churning in his grave to see how wrong he was: call the modern world the Inverted Polis.
Their own rules.... (Score:5)
RULING - Online distribution of copyrighted music is illegal.
People - But we thought we owned it since we bought it...
Time Warner - You merely bought the right to use it the way we see fit.
On Journalism:
RULING - Online distribution of copyrighted freelance jounalism is illegal.
Time Warner - But we thought we owned it since we bought it...
People - You merely bought the right to use it the way we see fit.
HAHAHAHAHahahahahahaha............
bm :)-~
Boilerplate already recast (Score:1)
Most publishers changed their boilerplate in 1995/1996 when it became evident that there was a revenue stream they weren't already definitely entitled to.
Re:Um, what about where it is legal? e.g., Taiwan. (Score:1)
It will "evolve" (Score:2)
That being said, there is nothing stopping freelancers from being replaced by "working stiffs" who don't get royalties. They are going to have to "evolve" with more competive content.
Re:This is a Good Thing (Score:1)
Memory Hole? (Score:2)
Just kind of ironic since I'm actually rereading that at the moment.
-Kasreyn
nope (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Memory Hole? (Score:1)
research (Score:1)
Twelve years male, bookbag, gun
Re:Issues (Score:2)
I wouldn't say that it's "fortunate" that it only affects older articles. Conducting online research is hard enough already, and this won't make it any easier. Many times, you are specifically looking for older material, which has always been hard to find online, and this won't make it any easier.
Our best hope is that the authors of the affected articles will choose to repost them themselves. Actually, this could be a positive development if they decide to post articles that were never made available online in the first place, as with those that publications offered only in their print editions.
Re:Check out the Publication Rights Clearinghouse (Score:2)
Re:Um, what about where it is legal? e.g., Taiwan. (Score:2)
Re:Here's an interesting question (Score:2)
If you want to protect your own work against disappearing, you better back it up in a format that you can preserve, and every so often look at updating it so it stays useful. E.g. right now, unless you can persuade someone your work is important enough to be etched in durable metals or printed on acid-free paper and kept in a vault, your best bet is probably good-quality CD-R's. Don't store them in a hot and humid climate, pull them out and check them once a year, and in five or ten years, you'll need to buy new media (DVD or whatever comes next) and copy them to it so the physical media stays up to date. Keeping the file formats up to date is a whole other problem -- but those whose work is adequately represented in plain ASCII probably don't have much to worry about.
Sounds hard? It sure beats what medieval monks had to do when the parchments in their possession started coming apart from age: kill a sheep, take the skin, scrape it and treat it to make new parchment, grind your own ink, then copy the old works by hand... And it's better than what you have to do to properly re-publish a 1930 SF story, if you can find someone who kept a copy all these years: type the whole darn thing in over again, because it's not legible enough to scan.
Re:Memory hole is not necessary (Score:4)
I doubt that maintaining an internet database generates all that much money, so they might have to crank their rates up a lot to be able to pay each freelancer a few bucks. And if you set the rates too high, most people just stay away...
To cover everything in some publications, you have to contact hundreds of freelancers. Even if you've got their phone #'s, this still takes quite a lot of time. And then there are the ones that retired or died -- tracking down people that have moved several times since they last sent you an article can be difficult and expensive, finding the heirs if the guy died is even harder.
It's possible that now that cash is in sight, the freelancers & their heirs will form an organization or hire an agency to represent them, to give the database makers one place (or a small number of agencies) to deal with, and to establish standard rates that are not so high as to kill the business. But freelancers being rather independent, you aren't going to see 100% of them joining...
why so much suspicion of journalists (Score:2)
Re:Contracts have changed already (Score:1)
Re:a new twist (Score:2)
> some of which are time-delayed (for a while
> there was Usenet distribution by backup
> tape to sites that didn't have network
> connectivity, for one extreme example)
Damn, I'll bet the Quake lag was terrible there.
Re:Memory hole is not necessary (Score:2)
1. Wait until they do pay-per-view on articles (they can track this, and it will be cheaper overall for ancient crap.)
2. Pump-and-dump, without the dump. Spam saying, "Hey, did you read article ? It answers your questions!"
3. Cash checks
Well, that's what one would do, if one were unscrupulous.
Time, Inc. is spouting BS! (Score:2)
Time, Inc. spokesman Peter Costiglio said[:] "The publishers lose because they have to delete articles; researchers, readers and historians lose because they won't have access to complete archives; and freelancers lose because their pieces won't appear in the archives."
A good friend of mine works at Time Warner in New York, and says that since the recent takeover by AOL, the staff of Time, Inc.'s corporate library -- a world-renowned resource for scholars -- has been fired in order to save money. The archives are being distributed piecemeal among the various offices of the company's publications.
Sounds like they don't give a damn about the "researchers, readers and historians" who have relied on Time's archives for decades. This ruling really won't have a very big impact, by comparison.
meanwhile at slashdot ... (Score:4)
Stimulus: Hey, Mathworld [mathworld.com] is down! CRC Press [crcpress.com] is claiming ownership over the internet version of the work!
Response: Greedy corporate bastards! Think they can take away our free content!
Stimulus: Hey, the Supreme Court ruled that freelance authors have rights over the internet versions of their works!
Response: Greedy author bastards! Think they can take away our free content!
Sigh.
Hard copies in decline (Score:3)
Actually, Nicholson Baker has been raising a cry over this very issue [j-walk.com]; it seems that, in many cases, the libraries aren't keeping the hard copies. So the loss may be real.
-- MarkusQ
memory holes?? This is quite disanalogous. (Score:1)
The case before the court concerned agreements between authors and publishers, and the liberality of interpretation of the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the 1976 Copyright Act. In essence, the court decided that authors were not properly compensated by the act of republication (versus a new edition) in electronic form. The case also was primarily concerned with proprietary databases such as LEXIS-NEXIS and the New York Times; Any long time user of either of these can tell you that selective coverage is normal and depends on the agreements between publishers and authors. This decision may add some confusion to the mix, or it may actually simplify things. I bet on the latter and think that writers are just asserting a reasonable claim against a vaguely worded statute that has deferred to publishers for too long.
Issues (Score:1)
Unfortunately, this removal could be avoided by simply making the payment to the authors who did the work.
Another problem is the issue of CD-based content. How will they prevent distribution of such archived works? If I have a CD with articles that are destined for electronic deletion are they going to go to my house and impound it?
anonymous coward ,troll wanabee,dead at 14 (Score:1)
Freelancers Publishing Model (Score:3)
1. unique works by hard-to-find specialists
2. notable authors
3. fill gaps in their internal staff.
For the first two categories, you get what you pay for. If a publisher wants to produce specialty works in-house, then the publisher must significantly beef up their internal staff. This is nothing new. If you license something, you play by the rules, just like GNU.
For the gap-fillers, the standard contracts are virtually always to the benefit of the publisher
In conclusion, the author of this article is hyping the situation. The ruling only confirms freelancers rights and licensing rights, while not significantly changing works-for-hire or the honest web publishing business models.