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'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.