Court Says CD-ROMs Of Magazine Archives Don't Violate Copyrights Of Article Authors

from the phew dept

There have been a series of lawsuits over the years concerning whether or not magazines could create CD-ROM archives of their magazines without having to pay all their freelance authors again. The court rulings have been mixed, to say the least -- with some ruling one way, and others ruling the other. The end result was some rather twisted logic that suggested magazine publishers could republish magazines via CD-ROM, but only if they did so in an incredibly annoying fashion.

Why? The reasoning shows the twisted impact of copyright law, but here we go: basically, if the CD-ROM is just a very limited reproduction of the magazines without any additional features (search being a key one), then it's okay. As soon as you add in anything useful that a digital version would allow (like search), then suddenly it changes the nature of the work, and it somehow violates the copyright of the writers. Bizarre? Indeed.

Luckily, however, in one of the ongoing cases, a full appeals court rehearing has reversed an earlier ruling, pointing out just how ridiculous this interpretation is. So, at least in this circuit, publishing a CD-ROM archive (even one with a search engine) appears not to violate the copyright of freelancers. However, as that article notes, what's truly scary is reading through the dissent by the judge who insists that the inclusion of that search engine really does change the very nature of the work, and who controls the copyright. Where it reaches the level of the truly absurd, however (as pointed out in the link above), is where one of the dissenting judges actually suggests that not allowing these archives to go forward wouldn't impact the historical archives of this content, because magazine publishers could just store archives that would only be available to be "utilized primarily by researchers and scholars." However, actually taking advantage of what the technology allows, and making it so everyone can benefit, and you've run afoul of copyright law. Luckily, the majority overruled this tortured reasoning.

Filed Under: cd-roms, copyright, freelancers, magazines, republishing

Your Website Shouldn't Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication

from the not-an-afterthought dept

We spend a lot of time here at Techdirt beating up on large media companies for their poor media strategies. For a long time, established media companies saw their websites as little more than an afterthought. Stuff tended to be developed for the print version first, and then got dumped to the website as an afterthought. This meant the content was often stale, and it certainly wasn't designed to engage the online conversation. Even worse, in many cases the content was hidden behind a paywall, further cutting it off from the online conversation. Recently, though, we've seen a few major media properties start to take the web seriously, not just as an adjunct to their print editions but as an important medium in its own right. I noted a few months ago that the New York Times seems to be taking the web seriously, and now the Times notes that the Atlantic has jumped on the bandwagon. (Full disclosure: A couple of the magazine's recent hires are friends of mine.) The Atlantic has done several smart things. First, they've dropped their paywall, not just for their new content but also for selected articles from 150 years of the print edition. Given that back issues were previously collecting dust on the shelves, that can only help drive traffic to the site. More importantly, they've recruited a stable of lively, high-profile bloggers who not only attract traffic to their own blogs, but by discussing content appearing elsewhere on the site, help to raise the profile of the site as a whole. They've also been proactive about experimenting with new technologies, including full-text RSS feeds and Flash-based video. The story indicates their traffic has quadrupled, and that's before their paywall goes down this week. The urgency of magazines' modernization projects is intensified by news that Wal-Mart is removing more than a thousand magazines from their store shelves, including major titles like the New Yorker, Forbes, Fortune, and BusinessWeek. Paper is a slow, expensive, and cumbersome way to transmit news, and as online news sources mature, more and more users will find they no longer have any use for dead tree publications. So making their websites successful is no longer optional for mainstream print publications: if they don't modernize quickly, they're going to quickly find themselves drowning in red ink very soon.

Filed Under: digital thinking, internet, magazines
Companies: the atlantic