Vol. 28 No. 3 Nov/Dec 2000

Few Sparks at Internet Librarian Tasini Discussion

A crowd of information professionals filled the seats of three adjoining conference rooms at the Pasadena Civic Center on Tuesday night during Internet Librarian. They had been promised fireworks when ‘SCOUG Meets Tonight!" to discuss the Tasini decision

An expert panel was assembled:

Carol Ebbinghouse, Library Director, Western State University, College of Law
Jonathan Tasini, President, National Writers Union
George Plosker, Gale Group
Michael Traynor, Attorney, Cooley Godward LLP
James Barcelona, Senior VP and Corporate Counsel, ProQuest
Stephen Arnold, Arnold Information Technologies
Simon Bradstock, Director of Global Marketing Communications, Factiva
Steven Abram from IHS Micromedia filled in as host for Barbara Quint.

Unfortunately, far from lighting fires, the panel cozily agreed that they all wanted to work together and, going forward, technology should make payments and royalties very easy to disburse. Several tantalizing subjects were raised, but there was little debate on the following: authors should be compensated for their work; publishers are responsible for contracting for the right to disseminate information electronically; aggregators have to do what the publishers tell them to do (which means removing thousands of articles from their databases); this material is governed by licenses and contracts, not copyright; the issue boils down to economics.

A few minor dissensions were noted: aggregators feel that the transactional model has not produced extensive revenues and for the most part, end-users have not borne a fair share of the cost of information. A few publishers in the audience contended that there aren’t huge revenues in publishing and the writers are trying to get money where there isn’t any.

Several suggestions and concerns about technology were raised. For older archives that go 15-30 years back, articles are not tagged as being written by a freelancer. This makes comprehensive retroactive compensation nearly impossible. Going forward, this tag could be included for tracking purposes, but the older material might be removed so the liability is gone. One audience member pointed out that he never receives royalty payments for reprints, yet he knows his articles are redistributed by a vendor that charges a handsome copying fee plus a copyright fee.

What’s the bottom line for librarians? The professionals sitting with me were concerned that articles are being pulled from databases and end-users don’t know what’s missing. In some cases, even a bibliographic citation is unavailable. This effectively means that the article never existed. Newspaper librarians in particular are concerned about "holey archives." A note of alarm was sounded by Steve Arnold who said that librarians may be signing contracts with aggregators or publishers that allow them to store data on an intranet when in fact the aggregator/publisher doesn’t have the authority to make that agreement. This could prove to be a huge liability.

The discussion raised more questions than it answered, and would have been improved by having more input from publishers. It will be interesting to see how this case plays out, but it seems clear that more than ever, information will rise in cost and be more difficult to access.

For more information on this case, visit these Websites:

"Supreme Court Rules for Freelance Writers in Tasini Appeal," Marydee Ojala
http://www.onlineinc.com/news/news01/tasini.html

"What Does the Tasini Decision Mean for Us Librarians?"
http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/9910/msg00033.html

National Writers Union Home Page
http://www.nwu.org/

Debbie Hartzman, Amgen Inc.