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Supreme Court to Rule
in Online Copyright Appeal

The Supreme Court agreed November 6 to decide whether the New York Times and other publishing companies violated six New York freelance writers’ contracts by making their work available in electronic databases. Company lawyers are appealing a Second U.S. District Court ruling they say would be “disastrous for the nation’s libraries, academic institutions, and publishers.”

The Associated Press reported that the court will hear arguments by the Times,, Newsday, Time Inc., Lexis/Nexis, and University Microfilms, which contend the lower court ruling “sets a national rule requiring the destruction of decades’ worth of articles stored in electronic archives.”

The authors contend that the database publishers didn’t seek copyright permission before digitizing their articles verbatim. The publishers are countering that the digitized versions constitute revisions per copyright law.

Posted November 13, 2000.

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