Slashdot Mirror

It's not like there's a union for all writers (fiction authors, non-fiction authors, columnists, manual authors, speech writers, journalists, etc.).

Yes there is.

I think that it'd be a straight up financially bad idea for almost everyone. In addition to making the barriers to entry for new developers and IT professionals higher, we'd all suffer in terms of the actual money we take home. Union contracts base pay around seniority, not productivity. In fact, most unions violently oppose productivity-based pay scales.

Not all unions are the same, you know.

Professional baseball players have a union. You think they're getting paid based on seniority?

Actors and writers have unions. You think they're not getting paid based on their performances?

A union is whatever the workers who form it make it. Those workers know the facts of their industries and form their unions accordingly. Just because some unions stress seniority doesn't mean yours has to.

osu-neko wrote:
That's not too bad, though. It means neither side has gotten to him yet. We have an opportunity to make a case.

I really doubt that was his motivation, but seeing that Bruce Lehman (the chief architect behind the DMCA) is his political advisor, I would want something in writting before believing him.

Another link

Wow, nice criteria you have.

How about...what's the difference on the candidates support of the PATRIOT Act? How about their stance on the poor intelligence leading up to the Iraq invasion? (Senate/House Intelligence Committee members bears some of the blame.) What's their stance on the DMCA? What does Kerry have to say about Bruce Lehman being a Technical Advisor? (Bruce Lehman was a big mover and shaker during the Clinton years..not a friend of this crowd to be sure.)

Why does Kerry's yay vote appear in the resolution authorizing the President to use force in Iraq, but later he says it was the wrong war at the wrong time? The whole damn world knew GWB was itching to invade Iraq...if he wasn't for invasion (before he voted against it), why did he vote yay?

What's the difference in the candidates Energy Policy? Why does Bush favor nuclear power and Kerry favor expanding coal usage? How does either one address our need to find alternative fuels or lessen our consumption of fossil fuels?

(Again, IANAL.) It's appropriate that you should mention the NYT, because they lost a court case over a similar issue. It comes down to what "publishing" means. In print, it's pretty easy to tell: the NYT is allowed to publish copies of its newspaper, but you and I aren't. If we started making photocopies of the NYT and distributing them, we would clearly be in breach of copyright.

But on the net it gets fuzzier. Usenet posts are replicated and made available on a large number of unrelated servers around the world, each one of which can be considered a separate instance of publication. So when you post to usenet, you implicitly grant a license to pretty much anyone, including Google, to reproduce your post for usenet-related purposes. (This is imho. I don't think anybody's ever actually tested it by suing Google for breach of copyright. You could be the first!)

I agree with you that Gmail's TOS could include a clause that grants them a license to publish your e-mail; however it currently doesn't. That would unsettle an awful lot of people for not much benefit. People might be a little wary that Google can read their e-mail, but they'd be terrified at the thought that Google could publish it.

Yeah, O'Reilly is a real trooper with these copyrights. Maybe one of these days, the company will start assigning copyrights to the authors instead of hoarding them for itself. Presumably the texts are works for hire.

If a piece of work is classifiable as "work for hire," then the publishing company owns the copyright. See this article and a summary of the relevant law. Recently musicians have found their work falling under an expanded clause.

Grievance & Contract Division

of the

National Writer's Union

Well worth it.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Grievance & Contract Division

of the

National Writer's Union

Well worth it.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

terrymah said: "Circumventing their registration system basically amounts to stealing."

IANAL but one could make the argument that the NYT is guilty of "latches" by allowing people to view articles without registering and not "correcting" the problem. If this argument was success [in court] they could be required to stop using thier required registration scheme [to view articles].

Yes, it is stealing but it's not theft (1) which a real crime. Besides, ask some freelance writers about the NYT being the thief.

Just another AC

(1) From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913):
Theft \Theft\, n.
The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.

rknop said way back while I was in the restaurant:

Even with a good tool like Google, most of the time (in my experience) one wades through a lot of "crap"...

And almost everything in the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale is is total crap - which bit isn't depends on what question you have in mind right now.

Haven't you noticed: very few of the trusted sources show up on Google. Some CNN, no BBC, among first-rank national newspapers only the Hindustan Times that I can think of... and that, translated to India's politics, is a bit Washington-Times-ish.

Why not? because they're planning for subscription access. (If you want to develop the argument about why this blocks spiders, obviously you can do it yourself. And figure why tightly-targeted advertizing using all those damn questions about your inside leg measurement is pretty much the same thing.)

Why subscriptions? Because, I strongly suspect, they're worried that if they go for micropayments the argument for sharing revenue with actual authors - writers and photographers and artists and musicians - will get a lot stronger. And they hate that, because they're wedded to a Steel Age model of what they own. See the Tasini -v- Times case and (same URL) the Times' dog-in-the-manger response.

But if they did opt for micropayment, all that selected and reviewed content would be available to all researchers without the hassle of remembering whether it's cypherpunx2 or cypherpunks666 that still works as a login on the Times.

With micropayment, information would be a lot more free, in the "speech" sense. Everything would be indexed. Everything would provide source info and a couple of paragraphs (thumbnail photo, musical intro) for free. You like the sample, you click, you pay your $0.02, the aggregator gets $0.01, I get my $0.01.

Yes, I declare an interest. I make my living writing stuff. I give a lot away. But not the best stuff, not the thoroughly-researched stuff. Obviously, not the stuff that I invested days rather than minutes in.

If you want free stuff, there'll always be plenty of free stuff. You'll just have to invest the time to weed it out from among the crap for yourself. Another way of saying what I do for a living is: I develop an understanding of the story and cut the crap for you. You want to do it yourself, fine: but how much an hour do you charge yourself for sieving shit?

As an occasional freelance journalist (an index of my writing can be found on my homepage,) I'm a member of this union, and I'm actually quite proud of that.

Until now, I only mentioned The Times' outright thievery. But, even before it was caught (you wonder what it really knew), the Times' did what every legal miscreant does-unleash its lawyers. In 1995, The Times issued a "work-for-hire" agreement, which decreed that all articles written by its freelancers would be "'works made for hire' and that, as such, The New York Times shall own all rights, including copyright, in your articles. As works made for hire, your articles may be reused by The New York Times with no extra payment made to you."

The Times wasn't alone. In the past five years, there has been a growing movement by media companies to demand from writers an ever-expanding menu of rights for no additional compensation. Virtually all contracts now demand a broad license to use a first-time print publication work in a wide array of electronic formats. The most onerous of the new contracts have been "all-rights" and "work-for-hire" contracts. There is a subtle legal distinction between those two versions: an "all-rights" contract implicitly argues that the writer owned the copyright when the work was created and is now licensing its entire use away, while under "work-for hire," the employer, from a legal standpoint, is considered the original creator of the work.

However, from an economic standpoint, the difference is effectively irrelevant. All-rights and work-for-hire contracts take away our right to decide how our work will be used, our right to make approve editorial changes and make sure our work remains as intact as it was when we typed the last period and, yes, the right to a fair return for what we create. Indeed, while the 1976 Copyright Act, in theory, protects individual authors, it is being obliterated by the sacrosanct written contract.

Interesting to see Michael's take on individual creators and corporations. Quoth your Constitution, with his response:

"to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8).

Hmm, do you notice it doesn't say to publisher or manufacturers. . .I wonder if there would be a possible lawsuit for the cases in which the publishers get the first copyright. . .even on "works for hire". . . ?

Indeedy. For the benefit of US-based readers: the mainstream of international law doesn't have a "work for hire" concept. The mainstream isn't copyright at all, it's Authors' Rights, and they are personal rights: principally the right to be identified as the author, and the right to defend the integrity of your work. Economic rights flow from these, which are akin to human rights - the opposite of the case in English-speaking countries where copyright is a commodity.

In the USofA, no author has either of these badly-named "moral rights" (except an artist who creates a work in a signed and numbered edition of less than 200). There's a current of opinion that this puts the USA in flagrant breach of international law - that Berne Convention.

Except that when it came to writing laws covering authors of software, all the people who understood the law didn't understand software. So the software companies snuck "work made for hire" into Authors' Rights countries.

/.ers shouldn't have too much trouble imagining a parallel universe in which software authors have the right to a byline and the right to stop marketdroids interfering with the poetry of their code. Hell, in this world it would probably be compulsory for every error message to have a personal by-line. Which would be nice.

Summary: there's a world of difference between laws which protect individual rights of authorship, and those which protect the Moloch Media Corp. Unfortunately, the US and the UK have the wrong kind. I'm trying to work out how to change that. See this paper on moral rights and the Tasini -v- Times case about to go before the Supremes.

Like Nielsen, I've been saying for years that eventually micropayment will be the way - at least for users who fall in the mid-range between couch potato and expert for the information in question. For example see here from 1997 (it shows) and the capsule version here.

The key points, it seems to me, are:

• What you pay your connection provider is a utility bill - like the lighting by which you read that book, the heating for your TV womb. Quite different from the payment for the book or the video, an (inadequate) portion of which goes to the humans who made the words and pictures.
• Micropayments offer the chance for wider diversity of content. With micropayments, if I want the scoop on CPRM I'll have these choices:
  • Going to an advertiser-supported site for a really quick view, with the added effort of reading through the commercial bias;
  • Paying $0.05 to an independent for their analysis and summary of what's going on; or
  • Doing the research myself from free sources, FoI requests, etc. Set aside a day or three...
• Corollary of the above: in your own area of expertise free stuff is fine. The areas where you want to pay an independent are those where you want proper information but to avoid expanding your expertise more than absolutely necessary, e.g. avoid learning statistical mechanics or Russian.
• To understand the argument between advertiser-supported and otherwise-supported media, it helps a lot to have spent time outside the USofA. Public-service media rock.
• Micropayments are linked to the battle between independents (like me) and the copyright-grabbing corporations. See Tasini -v- Times . Corporations don't like the idea because it increases pressure on them to hand over a share to the humans who make the content. How would you feel about a paid-for Napster if half the $1 went to the artists? Or 80%?
• Proper micropayments need to be digital cash: secure, anonymous and quite separate from the credit card clearance system. And if only interoperativity standards can be put in place they should be economic down to $0.0001 or less.

Mike

However, politically... those of us who actually work in the industry rather than own it (realizing that some folks do both), have very little influence. Politically, we are all over the map with a general spirit of libertarian ethics with a distrust of the megacorporation ingrained into our psyche by personal expierence and cyberpunk literature we have been gobbling for the last two decades.

And, if we formed our own party in the single member-district system of the U.S (sorry, I know the rest of the world is more democratic with parlimentary systems) such would be a third party which would never gain any influence outside of local elections in California and the Pacific North West. We also, as workers, don't have the money to buy...er...lobby politicans. Easy example... if you and AOL/Time-Warner lobby congress about MP3s, who do you think is going to win?

No, fellow workers... we get paid so much because we have power. Power, untapped and unrealized. Middle-management was gutted through downsizing and our network connections have given rise to more "just-in-time" capitalism. Our skills , if you believe the Software Labor Shortage Myth are in such short supply that we can not train and import workers fast enough. Imagine if we can collectively come to agreements in which we decide what things we will work for and will not. Not only can we have influence over technology, but a host of other things that need geeks to be accomplished.

Our power is in action, not the ballot box. We can vote with our feet. We can strike (here is the source. We can slack and slow down. We can sick-in. We can boycott. We can Direct Action. We can be as Electornically Civilly Disobedient, and we can be... it works like we did with Low Power FM through an organized political campaign of radio piracy, we were able to sieze part of the spectrum from corporate monoplization for community interests. We can break mass media blackouts of information, by making our own media, like we did in Seattle, and like we'll do again in DC.

Are you tired of 60-hour work weeks? Of corporations making deals with politicans to undermine over-time pay and encourage permatemping? We don't have to be slaves.

Are you tired of technology developing that penalizes both the worker and the consumer, to the benfit of a handful of the rich and power... anybody remember the Java Class War? Where was our class in that? Complaining about how the standards needed to be independent of propietary control, and largely doing nothing about it! We need to take control of training and make it clear that it is those of us work in the industry that can figure out who knows what, rather than some profiteering third party or a way for leading software companies to gouge folks for certification!

We need non-profit employment services (or hiring halls) so we can dump our contracting companies (ie. pimps, job sharks, etc... ) once and for all.

We need to organize, and organize in a way that maintains our autonomy and democratic values. We don't need any union bosses, telling us what we can and can't do... but we do need to be in solidarity with our fellow workers so we can support each other in struggle. Who among you wouldn't strike to help the workers in hardware manufacture to get a better shake? Some more pay, a safer environment, etc... Who among you wouldn't refuse to work, if you knew by refusing for a short time you could bring in ecological sound practices. We can bring on the Viridian revolution, but innovation won't be enough... we have to force the issue and force companies to clean up their mess.

We have to become responsible, or we have noone to blame for how bad work is but ourselves.

Solid,

Flint

Baltimore IWW Telecommunications and Computer Workers IU560

(San Francisco, Toronto)

Also check out: Syndicat de l'Industrie Informatique, Washington Technical Workers Alliance, FACE Intel, Alliance@IBM, BITE Division of NWU (Business - Instructional - Techincal - Electronic).

We Can Win! No Nerds, No Birds!

These publications had specifically bought "First North American Serial Rights" (FNASR) from the authors -- this is supposed to mean that if your article appears on Sept. 28, 1999, they will have to pay you again if they want to sell a copy of it again after that date.

Because they had not bought specific rights to republish the articles after the first publication, the newspapers tried to argue that the inclusion in the database was part of the initial publication (even though some of the articles were written years before the databases existed). The ruling is that perpetual publication in a database is not part of FNASR

Under American law, FNASR is the default in the absence of specific terms to the contrary.

Of course, these days the freelance contract does include signing away electronic rights -- the articles in the suit were written 10 years ago.

Another side comment: freelance work is rarely "work for hire" -- in fact they are usually opposites. "Work for hire" means that the product produced is a product of the corporation and not the individual -- a product is "work for hire" by default only if it is part of the job description of a salaried employee. Other cases would require specific contract terms. In freelance journalistic writing, "work for hire" terms are generally considered completely unnacceptable (of course, it's different for writing marketing copy, etc.) If it were "work for hire" the publication would own the copyright and have all rights exlusively.

The National Writer'a Union site has the full text of the ruling.

+_+_+_+_+_+

"I am not trying to prove that I am right,
I am only trying to find out whether."