Individual personalities, national cultures and legal systems often bump into one another on the World Wide Web.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last week that free-lancers’ work cannot be used in electronic databases without their permission stakes out some territory for writers — and limits for U.S. publishers — in the electronic frontier. Free-lance writers retain property rights when their work, published in newspapers and magazines, is collected in computerized databases, the court decided in New York Times Co. vs. Tasini.
Some newspapers, such as The New York Times, say they now will remove tens of thousands of articles from commercial databases, including Lexis-Nexis.
The Courant, which embarked later in electronic archiving, signs contracts with free-lance writers granting the newspaper permission to distribute their work electronically.
Publications that redistributed free-lance work earlier, without permission, will have to make amends that could include deleting the articles or compensating the authors.
Although the lawsuit was brought by free-lancers, many writers do want their work — and ideas — to be disseminated widely, and for posterity. Others may expect additional compensation or control over how and where their work is reproduced.
Such control becomes increasingly difficult when e-mail and other technologies make it so easy to copy and informally pass along articles in electronic form — or even post, excerpt or alter them without permission.
The Supreme Court decision — and this newspaper’s adherence to the rules — in some ways are as quaint as a picket fence on a vast electronic prairie.
But, as Northeast magazine Editor Lary Bloom, long committed to nurturing writers, notes, quality ultimately suffers if writers are not respected and compensated for their work. Or, to quote a French saying, “All work deserves to be paid.”
Here’s what you can and cannot find on The Courant’s website and paid online archives (or through the Lexis-Nexis database, available by subscription):
Some recent staff-written articles, accessible free, on www.ctnow.com. All staff articles (since 1994, and some since 1991), should be available through the paid online archives (and Lexis-Nexis).
Most free-lance articles. These are generally identified in the newspaper by “Special To The Courant.” If the newspaper has acquired the electronic rights, they should be accessible through the online archives or through Lexis-Nexis.
Some wire service articles are posted as breaking news on ctnow.com. The site also frequently links to a collection of national and international news, videos and other links with contributions from news organizations owned, as is The Courant, by Chicago-based Tribune Co.
However, many wire service articles and syndicated columns published in the newspaper are not posted on ctnow.com or in the online archives because The Courant does not own the rights to distribute them electronically.
Readers searching for back copies of such articles would have to find copies of the issue in which the article appeared in a public library or on microfilm, or visit the website of the newspaper in which the article was first published.
Or, better yet, read them, over a cup of coffee, in this newspaper.
The Courant on probation?
Several readers noticed last week that the photo captions Thursday reporting that Hartford Public High School’s probation was lifted contained a glaring grammatical error. The school will keep “it’s accreditation,” the Page 1 caption reported. To make matters worse, a headline inside the Life section that day reported that a new dean had been appointed at a university art “scool.”
“Who will accredit The Courant?” asked a West Hartford reader.
“Better send your writer back to school!” wrote another.
Or is that scool?
Rio de Janeiro is not in Peru
A Wethersfield reader, originally from Peru, thought he’d discovered errors in geography when two Chicago Tribune articles about Peru, reprinted in The Courant last month, were labeled “Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.” The label — or dateline — at the beginning of an article generally indicates from where the reporter is writing. In this case, the Chicago Tribune reporter who covers most of South America is based in Brazil. She wrote her articles from there, using her previous reporting, wire reports and contributions from a free-lance writer in Lima.
The newspapers were being honest that the reporter was not in Peru at the time.
The world may be connected, amorphously, by a World Wide Web of computers. Still, readers deserve to know, as they were told in this case, where on Earth their news is being written.
