A pause for a moment to reflect on a little project I’ve been involved with for, geez, almost 15 years. A settlement has been reached with publishers and database companies that will bring authors up to $18 million—I was part of the negotiating team that reached the deal. The deal will come before a U.S. federal judge Thursday morning for preliminary approval. Assuming preliminary approval, authors will then have 120 days to submit claims from the time official notice is made of the settlement.
The settlement just about brings to a close a long chapter in efforts made to hold the media industry accountable for its massive infringement of the works of freelance authors. The legal fight began almost 15 years ago when it became clear to me that the industry was methodically illegally using authors’ works. Though the wheels of justice do grind slowly—the suit against The New York Times et.al. was filed in 1993 and we only tasted final victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2001—it is still satisfying to know that potentially thousands of authors will be able to pocket some cash, a thought that kept me motivated during the most recent negotiations in the class action suits. But, of course, the long-term efforts to empower creators continues.
Under the terms of the settlement, publishers including the New York Times, Time Inc., and the Wall Street Journal and database companies including Dow Jones Interactive, Knight-Ridder, Lexis-Nexis, Proquest, and West Group agreed to pay writers up to $1,500 for stories in which the writers had registered the copyright in accordance with timetables established in federal copyright law. Writers who failed to register their copyrights will receive up to $60 per article. The amount paid will depend on a number of factors, including whether the writer registered the copyright, the original fee paid for the article, the year it was published, and whether the writer permits the future use of the article in the databases.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that sometimes we can win.
(See also http://www.newsdissector.org/blog/wp-print.php?p=1166)
