Publication Rights Clearinghouse in In These Times

Author Karl Bermann has granted permission for us to distribute the following text.  

Irvin Muchnick
Assistant Director
National Writers Union
<irvmuch[_at_]netcom.com>

PUBLISHED IN IN THESE TIMES
April 15, 1996  

INFOBAHN TOLL BOOTH   By Karl Bermann  

The National Writers Union (NWU) has announced the start of the first transaction-based royalty system for freelance creators in the electronic media. Under the terms of a pioneering agreement with the UnCover Co., the NWU will administer a new collective licensing agency called the Publication Rights Clearinghouse (PRC). Isabel Allende, Nicholson Baker and Todd Gitlin were among the first group of freelancers to enroll in PRC.  

UnCover, a subsidiary of Knight-Ridder, Inc., is the world's largest online periodical index. The company faxes magazine and journal articles, mostly to academic researchers, from its database of 17,000 titles. Under the PRC agreement, UnCover will charge $11.05 for each article faxed. Authors enrolled in PRC will be credited with a royalty of $2.04, provided they have retained the rights to the work. Both union and non-union creators may enroll in PRC, but the latter will pay a surcharge. UnCover presently faxes about 1,000 articles per day. It hopes to inaugurate a digital delivery system in the near future.  

The cyberspace copyright agency establishes the NWU as a major force in the information age. "This is the silver bullet that's been missing," says NWU Assistant Director Irv Muchnick, who coordinates the PRC project. "Now we have a direct economic relationship with our members." Until now the 4,500-member, UAW-affiliated union has had to confine itself largely to advocacy. Muchnick expects that PRC will play a role in electronic publishing similar to that played by ASCAP in the music industry.  

PRC represents an important victory in the NWU's campaign to end what it calls "information superhighway robbery." According to Muchnick, online publishers and database operators have been "systematically commercializing" newspaper and magazine articles written by freelancers,
"completely cutting out the creator from the revenue
stream."  

The NWU has plunged aggressively into issues involving copyright law and Infobahn technologies. In 1993, union president Jonathan Tasini and 10 other NWU members filed a federal class-action suit charging copyright piracy against the *New York Times*, Lexis-Nexis and other major e-publishers and database operators. That suit is now making its way through the courts.  

Muchnick says the establishment of PRC will greatly strengthen the union's position in *Tasini vs. New York Times* and on copyright issues in general. "PRC shows that the writing community is conscientious about making it easy to comply with copyright law. With a collective licensing agency, somebody doesn't have to write a 37 cent check every time they use something." PRC thus cuts the ground from under a claim made by the defendants in the NWU sujit that it is not practical to pay royalties to freelancers when material is uploaded from print to electronic media.  

Partly in response to the NWU's challenge, several major publishers, including the *New York Times*, have begun requiring freelancers to sign away all rights to reuse of their material as a condition of employment. But Muchnick sees *Tasini* as a stick held over e-publishers' heads:
"We're saying to them, 'Look, if the plaintiffs prevail in
*Tasini vs. Times*, in whole or in part, as we think they will, then you are going to be exposed to huge asbestoslevel  damages.'" PRC, meanwhile, is the carrot: "We're saying, 'This is the face of the future -- collective licensing, negotiation of standards for this new industry.'"  

Muchnick hints that PRC is already negotiating with other Infobahn companies, but says he isn't ready to make any announcements yet.  

PRC will operate from the NWU's West Coast office in Oakland, Calif. (phone: 510-839-0110; Internet: nwu[_at_]nwu.org). Last month, it was getting its computers connected to those at UnCover and beginning the process of verifying copyright holdings for its charter enrollees. It expects to mail the first royalty checks this summer. Received on Mon Apr 29 1996 - 07:40:02 GMT