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| Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 1999 |
by Tabitha M. Powledge
Having succumbed to the lure of a regular check and benefits and taken a full-time job, Joel Shurkin also vacated the chair of the NASW freelance committee. Luckily, however, he turned it over to Kathryn S. Brown, huzzah!
On sitting down, Kathryn immediately got back to work on that survey of NASW freelances we keep promising you. She reports that the survey-an effort to find out just what NASW's freelances do-is finally under way. A professional survey group will be conducting it because Prez Joe is kindly giving us some money to pay them, thanks Joe!
In short, the intent is a serious survey. Kathryn adds, "Please put in a plug asking any members surveyed to PLEASE respond to the survey-we can't make use of the data without the data. So use your charms to twist their arms, and maybe this survey will do something insightful." Consider yourself plugged, charmed, and twisted.
Kathryn's plans also include our very own Web site in conjunction
with the NASW site. She has put together a team to gather content
suggestions, sort out design, and help get it online. The plan
is for the site to go live some time before our Millennial meeting
in February. More news as it happens.
Membership on the committee has also changed some. At this writing,
members are Beryl Benderly, Blbink@aol.com;
Kathryn S. Brown (Honcho), polskas@showme.missouri.edu;
Brian Lavendel, lavendel@bigfoot.com;
John Miller, millsin@en.com;
Tammy Powledge, tam@nasw.org;
Joel Shurkin, joel@nasw.org;
Lori Stiles, lstiles@u.arizona.edu.
I've saved the best 'til last: You can join this distinguished group of your peers. Just drop an e-mail to Kathryn.
....will not be found here. Or, apparently, anywhere else.
Yes, the Millennium has actually arrived: writers have gotten back the right to determine how our work will be reused.
Unfortunately, we're not at all sure what to do about it.
Here's the nub: unless you have sold or given them away in a contract, you retain e-rights to your work. If your work is available electronically without your permission, your copyright has been violated. On September 24 the US Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, ruled that publishers cannot reuse material purchased from a freelance without the writer's permission, even in the absence of a contract. Reuse would include, for example, posting it on a Web site, selling the material through a database, or putting it on a CD-ROM. The decision reversed a previous decision in favor of publishers in a case brought by Jonathan Tasini, who heads the National Writers Union, and five other writers.
I won't go into detail about the decision because much such gab is available elsewhere. For the decision itself, see http://www.tourolaw.edu/2ndCircuit/September99/97-9181.html. Commentaries are available on the NWU Web site (http://www.nwu.org), the sites of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (www.asja.org) and the Authors Guild (www.authorsguild.org), and several other places on the Web.
Like you and me, none of these more-or-less Reliable Sources knows what's next. The publishers (which include the New York Times and a handful of other 800-pound gorillas) may appeal the appeal. NWU says it is thinking about mounting class-action suits on behalf of writers and/or negotiating collective licensing agreements with publishers.
We also await news about a decision on damages that has been sent back to the lower court. Will the six plaintiffs get a percentage of the original fee, or will they get more? The size of the damage award will apply legally only to Tasini, which was not a class-action suit. But in the real world, it will probably guide other settlements, including any that involve infringement of your copyrights.
So, what should you do now? The NWU advises that you first find out if any of your work is available online without your permission. Begin by searching the publishers' Web archives, Northern Light, Electric Library, and Lexis-Nexis. (To that I would add that if you don't have access to Lexis-Nexis, and few of us sole proprietors do, your public library will usually run a search for you for a modest fee, sometimes even free.)
If yours are among the thousands of print articles that have been pirated in violation of copyright, NWU also advises you to send a letter asking for compensation to each infringing publisher, beginning with the most prosperous. It suggests payment equal to the original print fee for each past reuse, and the same per year for future reuse in 'Net archives. For future databases, it advocates 15-30 percent of the original fee. NWU has put together a model demand letter for its members.
ASJA's comments to date take the long view. A recent issue of "Contracts Watch" (#64, November 5, 1999) calls for good will, points out that writers do not profit when publishers go out of business, and advocates that writers and publishers work together to find terms for reuse that are acceptable to both.
Everyone forecasts more work-for-hire and all-rights contracts. It's hard to see how there could be more of these instruments of the devil than there already are, but it may well be true that publishers will be even more intransigent about negotiating those terms. If you've had recent experiences indicating that the negotiating climate is getting even tougher, pass the bad news on by posting to nasw-freelance. We'll want to hear in particular about a formerly Good Guy who has suddenly become a Bad Guy.
No sooner had last issue's panegyric on the Encyclopaedia Britannica CD plunked into your mailbox than EB stunned the online world (and me) by making all the Encyclopaedia's content available free on its Web site. Three days later the site shut down, victim of popularity that was literally overwhelming. The company acknowledged that it was prepared for millions of hits, but not the tens of millions it actually got.
The site is now back up, www.britannica.com. It seems to be running smoothly, albeit quite pokily during the day and evening. Mirabile dictu, it really does bestow free access to all 72,000 Britannica articles, plus updates that are said to be frequent.
I couldn't imagine how EB-which is, after all, .com-planned to make a buck from this open-door policy. I keep remembering that those 32 volumes cost our folks as much as $2K. EB wants to sell advertising, of course, although there's none on the site as of this writing. Search on a topic and the site brings you first an opening snippet from the Encyclopaedia article-plus links to other Web sites, articles, book reviews, and other such accessories. EB is said to be a late entrant in the portal stakes, attempting something like Yahoo! or Excite!, only sans exclamation point. So far.
Once I had a chance to look around the site, however, I thought I discerned another plan too. EB's strategy seems to be similar to that of the National Academy Press. NAP flabbergasted the publishing industry by posting the full text of its books on its Web site. This sounds nuts, but in practice may work out. Here's why: You can't download or print an NAP book with a single set of instructions. You must walk through it page by tedious page, copying or printing as you go. Paying up for a hardcover copy delivered to your door soon begins to seem like a good deal to even the most thrifty.
So too with the free EB. Topics are presented page by page, and if it doesn't happen to be 3 a.m., each page loads verrrry slooooooowly. You can copy or print to your heart's content. But for anything other than a very short topic, I predict that your heart will achieve contentment rather quickly. And a major EB virtue is that many topics are not short. Take a look at "Evolution" and you'll see what I mean; the article's Table of Contents alone is longer than entire articles in other encyclopedias.
We're in luck, however, because the folks at EB value our time and have come up with a solution to save it. The new Britannica CD 2000 Deluxe should be available by the time you read this. $59.95, $39.95 with mail-in rebate. I'm asking for it for Christmas.
Addendum 'n' Erratum: In our last episode, a discussion of the inadequacies of search engines segued to praise of Encyclopaedia Britannica by observing that there is no substitute for information collected by and for human brains. The EB discussion then demonstrated the point. A computer spellchecker employed at SW did its mindless thing, stripping EB's sacred dipthong from the word Encyclopaedia.
Finding Your Voice Recognition, a Continuing Series
"Speech Recognition Approaches Perfection" was the shamelessly mendacious hed on PC Magazine's November 10 roundup on voice-recognition software. I read it the same day that Dragon Naturally Speaking presented me with the following:
I said: pharmacological. It typed: a lot of gold.
I said: therapeutic. It typed: European ticket.
I said: participation. It typed: purchase the patient.
I said: Law School. It typed: lost cool.
And those were just the errors that met my reporting criteria, which demand not just amusing gaffes, but a point of view.
The roundup itself, happily, is considerably more candid than the hed. http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/reviews/0,6755,2388289,00.html. A must-read if you're flirting with VR. The reviewers still prefer Naturally Speaking, which they tested at 96% accuracy, although they credit Via Voice (the IBM entry) with a little more, 98%. Since I have voted on the side of candor here, I must disclose that NS and I are doing better, but not quite that well. And when I had a bad head cold, the poor thing just went to pieces. This is one fascinating piece of software.
Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org