The Authentic Eccentric

Via Interesting People, Sally Richards brought up a great point about Google’s latest News Archive venture that has huge impact for freelancers, writers and photographers (links mine):

I hope Google and its partners in this venture remember the terms they purchased the stories under. Many freelance pieces “published years ago,” did not include Internet rights under standard contracts. Any of those stories were pre-commercial Internet. And many of those contracts have long since disappeared with time.

Many of those contracts included First North American Rights. I have to remind publishers many times over that they did not purchase all-inclusive rights when I do vanity searches and find my articles on the Internet that were purchased under First North American Rights. My guess is that a lot of freelancers will have to go into the business of being their own police and lawyer when this new business model for Google comes about.

You know, whenever Kinko’s makes a print of a photograph, they ask you to sign a release notifying you of copyright laws and stating that you personally own the rights to the photographs they are reproducing. Perhaps it’s time to start holding Google responsible for its content…. And to put a Can-spam law into place where there’s a flat $11,000 fee in place when a company is found in violation of the law (although, I’d like to see how many times that law has been implemented).

Even if Google agrees to take the content off the site, you have sites like the Wayback Machine that will keep that content up forever. In the end, it’s usually the people who create the content who make the least, and the companies that don’t give a damn about rights (or say, “Who cares, sue me,”) that end up profiting the most.

The only way that’s going to end is if there is some kind of law protecting content creators from companies that violate rights contracts. Writers currently have to prove damages, and with no way to audit microsales, how many times something has been accessed, for how much $$ and if it is originally what brought a surfer to the site (if so, what other purchases were made on that visit), damages cannot be physically proven.

As a former Kinko’s manager of a branch directly impacted by Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko’s Graphics Corporation [Harvard Square], I can assure you, she’s right. The only way to protect your rights is to aggressively pursue them; that may mean hiring a lawyer and fighting for them, or acting as your own lawyer if you can’t afford one on your own. If I hear of a lawyer or firm launching a class action suit, I will post an update to this article.

Kinko’s didn’t begin strict monitoring of all copied materials until there was a compelling legal reason to do so; you’d better believe that the fine folks at Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research won’t, either.

While these companies will inevitably protest compliance because they say it amounts to micropayments, it isn’t - just last month I spent over $180 on purchased articles. Those funds belong to the owners of the material, not the mega corporation who databased it.

Unlike Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko’s Graphics Corporation, this is not a case of fair, academic use of materials - this is a case of laughing off the legal agreements and contracts that limit publisher’s use of original copyrights. This seems at significant odds to Google’s philosophy of “You can make money without doing evil” - let’s hope they live up to it and work with freelancers, not against them.

For more information on copyright for writers, check out Sally’s page on copyright and the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ Rights 101.