High Court Sides with Writers
in Copyright Case
In a 7–2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled June 25 that newspapers and magazines infringed the copyrights of freelance contributors by making their published articles available, without further compensation, in electronic databases. The American Library Association had filed an amicus curiae brief in February supporting the freelancers.
The case originated in 1993, when the 7,000-member National Writers Union, headed by Jonathan Tasini, charged that the New York Times Company and several other publishers violated copyright law by reproducing their printed work electronically. The court agreed, saying that the holder of the copyright in a “collective work” does not retain that copyright if the contribution “is presented to, and retrievable by, the user in isolation, clear of the context the original print publication presented.”
A lower court will determine how the writers will be compensated. The New York Times Company said it would begin removing about 115,000 articles from its online databases to minimize liability. Time Inc. and Lexis-Nexis promised similar action, the New York Times reported June 26.
The ruling’s impact on libraries may in fact be limited. Many publications began including the right to digital reuse in their contracts soon after the suit was filed, and only a small proportion of the offerings in many databases (fewer than 1% of 2.8 billion Lexis-Nexis documents, for example) were affected by the ruling.
Posted July 2, 2001.
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