Columbia Journalism Review letter

PUBLISHED IN COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
March/April 1996  

Write On  

Please allow us to make one small correction and add a few footnotes to the item on the protest against the new allrights  contract for free-lancers at *The New York Times*.  

The National Writers Union is not a plaintiff in the pending federal copyright infringement suit against the
*Times* and five other major publishers and database
operators. That suit was filed in December 1993 by NWU president Jonathan Tasini and ten other members.  

Late last year, there were other developments on the electronic-rights front. In November, *Ski* and *Skiing* magazines -- both owned by the Times Mirror Company, whose
*Newsday* is a defendant in *Tasini v. Times* -- agreed to
begin paying freelancers for the reuse of their articles on SkiNet, their new World Wide Web site. Under the agreement, whenever an article by a free-lancer is posted on SkiNet, the magazines will pay an additional electronic-rights licensing fee of 10 percent of the original print-rights fee. This base fee will rise commensurate with the increase in the number of readers at the Web site. The SkiNet license has a one-year term.  

In December, the NWU's new collective-licensing agency, Publication Rights Clearinghouse, signed an agreement to establish a transaction-based royalty system in conjunction with the UnCover Company, which operates a fax-for-fee service of reprints from 17,000 popular magazines and academic journals. In October, UnCover and its sister CARL corporation (a for-profit spinoff of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries) were acquired by Knight-Ridder Information, Inc. -- whose corporate parent was simultaneously beginning to issue odious *Times*-style allrights  contracts to free-lance contributors at its chain of newspapers.  

Irvin Muchnick
Assistant Director
National Writers Union
<irvmuch[_at_]netcom.com> Received on Thu Mar 14 1996 - 21:16:12 GMT