Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Sides With Freelancers On Net Copyright
pgpckt writes: "The Supreme Court has ruled in a 7-2 decision that freelance writers retain control over whether or not their writing gets distributed on the Internet.. This decision gives writers more control as to what mediums their art gets distributed in, and helps to ensure royalties for publication in multiple forums."
As usual, the Slashdot posting is misleading and the ensuing comments are from people who'd rather be misled by the posting than go through the trouble of reading the article.
As the article mentions:
The case largely affects articles, photographs and illustrations produced a decade or so ago -- before free-lance contracts provided for the material's electronic use.
It just means that if your contract from several years ago didn't include anything about electronic publishing, then the publisher can't go and publish it electronically as if it's just a revision. But contracts nowadays do take electronic publishing into account, so the court's decision is irrelevant to them.
I think it's more of a situation where /. generally favors the "little guy" who, more often than not, is being taken advantage of by large monied corporate interests.
/. seems to be that paying *the artist who made the music* is the right thing to do - paying a huge megalomaniacal corporation $20 for a CD, of which the artist only gets a few pennies is fundamentally wrong somehow.
;) The point is that /. readers *seem* to favor the little guy, regardless of his situation -- it's a bit shortsighted, in that these rulings could be used *against* the little guy by corporations in the future -- but it's the way it seems.It's a good thing that any rights not explicitly granted to a *corporation* are reserved by an *individual* - but what if the corps flip it around? Use this as a defense as to why you can't copy that CD/DVD, or why you have to purchase ANOTHER copy of a certain piece of software... Use it, along with UCITA, to guarantee that those terms that you "agreed to" in their click-through license are binding in a way that ONLY benefits them... That's where it gets scary.
In this case, it's freelance writers who want to keep control of their works and not be taken advantage of by large publishing houses, who want to sell more ads and thus make more money, by using the freelance writer's work without their permission (note that these are *not* mainly for current freelancers, whose contracts most probably include permissions for digital distribution - they're mainly for older publications whose contracts didn't forsee, and thus didn't include, rights for digital distribution)
In the case of Napster et al. - it's a case of the consumer *and* the artist getting monetarily raped by the music industry. The general consensus on
There's also a bit of "well, the cat is out of the bag" syndrome there too, with the Napster thing - the music is already out there, available, for free - no ammount of legislation or watermarking or whatever is going to take those mp3s away from people who have them, whether they own the CD or not.
But that's beside the point
Just to offer my perspective:
I write for both the online and print versions of a publication. when i am assigned an article, i am told that it will be for the online site or the print magazine. i am paid different fees based on where the piece is to be published. i write based on the medium i'm writing for: the online site covers more up-to-the-day stuff ("breaking" news) whereas the print version is a little more "let's take a step back" material, since it takes about two months for my copy to actually appear in print (magazines have LONG turnaround times).
last week i noticed something that i was assigned to write for the print magazine showing up online. it had been editied differently to suit the fact that it was published on the site.
to me, these facts lend creedence to the idea that the Web is a lot more than just an archive of the print material: "instant" turnaround, different content, different pay rate. i was a little miffed that i hadn't been asked about the second publication, especially since the article was different.
just my two cents.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Seriously, this does raise a valid issue. When we post on Slashdot, who owns the copyright on the posting? What if you post text that is already covered by copyright (code, essay, etc).
Maybe we all just need to put a copyright notice at the bottom of our posting.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Publishers say the decision means they now must begin removing hundreds of thousands of articles, photos and drawings from their digital archives.
Yeah, or actually pay royalties to the freelancers. So it looks as if the net effect of this decision is going to be the removal of lots of valuable content from digital archives and not, in fact, increased revenue for freelance authors.
Crap.
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So does this mean Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics will be back up?
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I'm sorry, but delivery does matter in this case.
Publishers can seek any number of different publication rights when they offer to do business with a writer. By far, the most commonly-sought publication rights by U.S. publishers are FNASR, or First North American Serial Rights. That means that the publisher has purchased the rights to publish a previously upublished written work in a periodical for the first time in the U.S. or Canada.
FNASR is basically an exclusive, one-time "use right". After the work is published, the rights revert to the author who may sell the work again if he or she so chooses (although he may not again offer FNASR on the piece).
With the advent of the digital age, several publishers will negotiate for electronic rights, which can mean archiving in a database or to a CDRom; writers should be careful to specify any "exclusivity" clauses or "first time Internet rights," etc. to avoid accidental loss of use rights. It's all part of the contract negotiation.
What publishers have been saying, however, is that they automatically have the rights to publish the work in every new medium as it is invented, without needing to compensate the author or negotiate for rights--as it continues to derive new income from those works.
I think a point that many folks are missing here is that the authors aren't pursuing fans who've knowingly or unknowingly violated copyrights-- the villain in this piece is the fat corporate cats like AOL Time Warner who cry for protection of IP while trying to deny the same rights to authors.
Funny...when a similar claim to rights was made by the Voice Actor's Guild for the voices of commercial actors over internet radio, it was lauded as the death of the medium. Seems paradoxial in a way, to expect one set of rights to apply to content and another to advertisement. After all, how can one monetize something as transverse as money gained from a website? In the case of some websites -- notably those which don't utilize any advertisement or subscription online, but instead rely on their web experience as cursory entities driving extra-web media -- no "real" money exchanges hand over web content, though the web experience may heighten and therefore expand the product. An example of this is a news program which may add transcripts of its editorials on their websites. Surely, some of these may be written by freelancers, and therefore come under the realm of this ruling. Should a freelance writer be allowed the ability to immediately naysay this service (providing as it does an essential link to the extra-web media and additional utility for the consumer who might not have videotaped it) simply because the news service can't provide additional cash to the writer?
Of course, what this probably means is nothing more than an addendum to freelance contracts giving the rights to utilization of content in additional media to the media owner -- meaning a few extra lines of small print, and no real additional cash in the pocket of John Q. Freelance. Writers are a bit more savvy that other artists when it comes to not getting screwed out of their rights, but not much so...and the question remains as to whether this makes it possible for freelancers to fully sign over their work accidentally under the guise of "medium transferrance."
More murky legislation...I applaud the effort as a writer, but would prefer a more definite "content rights can never be bought or sold in any way without explicit and particular consent of the author" legislation. You know -- something to protect everybody artful, so Prince can keep his name if he moves labels and Corey Feldman can get a little say in the upcoming Goonies DVD.
I guess reading salon a lot has caused me to ask the question: why do we keep treating the arts, an almost exclusively romantic pursuit, the same was as classic pursuits such as law and economics? Artists don't understand numbers and calculators don't understand art, which means that "content creators" are getting screwed by people who don't even realise the impact of the money they're making. This is how the media can be controlled by incredibly rich companies and we still get shitty programming -- anybody savvy enough to climb the ranks no longer as enough taste left to make a quality decision, and anybody with the taste is loathe to discuss anything as vulgar as money and ratings.
If you give artists total say in what happens to their work and total rights based on money made (with an exception granted for non-profits), you end up with a situation similar to that of pre-mass media times: people make something beautiful or appealing and when it is exploited they are at the very least paid.
Hey freaks: now you're ju