An innovative online search service is facing the filing of a mass grievance by the National Writers Union for selling access to previously published articles on the Web - articles that it does not have the legal right to sell, the NWU claims.
The search service, called Northern Light, offers point-and-click access - for a small price - to more than 2 million articles archived from newswires like Business Wire, academic journals, and the pages of such periodicals as Forbes, Better Homes and Gardens, La Prensa, the Village Voice, and US News & World Report. Northern Light has made a name for itself in part by serving up search results in well-organized fashion (results are grouped into topic-oriented "custom folders"), but also by giving netsurfers access to documents that other, strictly Web-based search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo do not have in their databases.
It is those documents, grouped in the site's "Special Collection," that are in dispute. The contractual agreements between freelance writers and publishers - where signed contracts, in fact, exist - are often vague. Northern Light claims that it has licensed the rights to those articles from content "aggregators" like the Information Access Company and UMI. Northern Light president David Seuss insists that, in selling access to those articles on its site, his company isn't doing anything that premium databases like Lexis-Nexis and Dialog haven't been doing for years.
The difference, Seuss claims, is that now the authors of those articles can type their name into a search window on the Web to discover that their articles are being resold.
"Those premium services - Lexis-Nexis, Dialog, Dow Jones Interactive - were very expensive, and locked away behind corporate walls. The freelance community never realized," Seuss says, "that its writing was being relicensed every day."
Now, it would appear, freelance writers have realized it - and they're pissed. Hoag Levins, editor at Editor and Publisher Interactive, declared in a letter posted to a mailing list for online journalists, "Northern Light is flat out stealing our material and that of others."
The director of the NWU's Publication Rights Clearinghouse project, Naomi Zauderer, says that she has received 50 or 60 letters from writers who were disturbed to discover that their work was being resold by Northern Light. Zauderer disputes Seuss' parallel between what Northern Light is doing and what has been traditionally offered by premium database services.
"Lexis-Nexis charges for the time using the service. Northern Light is charging download fees per article. There are multiple layers of infringement here," Zauderer claims.
"What we find particularly egregious," she adds, "is the fact that Northern Light is telling writers who complain that they have to talk to the original publishers about the rights. What they're saying, essentially, is, 'We don't believe you.'" Zauderer says that unless the site agrees to change its policies by early next week, the NWU will file a mass grievance against Northern Light.
Seuss acknowledged that Northern Light will not be swayed by requests from writers to remove articles that are in dispute from its database. If an original publisher affirms that it did not have the rights to sell a piece to one of Northern Light's aggregators, however, Seuss promises that his company will "promptly comply" with a request for removal.
"We're not a marriage counselor," Seuss says. "It's not our job to shuttle between writers and publishers and negotiate a happy relationship." Seuss says his company has only received a dozen complaints from writers. "We have 2 million articles in our archives. If we have to delete a dozen articles, it will hardly make a dent."
The NWU's Publication Rights Clearinghouse was launched in August 1996 to address issues of copyright, ownership, and royalties in a world that is swiftly changing as a result of new ways of accessing information - like Northern Light. In 1996, the PRC successfully negotiated an agreement with Knight-Ridder's UnCover Inc., the largest index of periodicals in the world. UnCover offers reprints of articles by fax, and under the terms of the agreement, when UnCover sells an article for US$11.50, $2.55 goes to the author. Articles on the Northern Light site typically cost $1-$2.
"The Internet is like the Wild West - there's a certain amount of total lawlessness," Zauderer observes. "We're not trying to keep writing off the Web or out of other databases ... but Northern Light seems to think if they get articles from [the Information Access Company], they can trust that everything's OK. They're not even attempting to find out."
"The thing about the Web is, it's easier to infringe," adds Zauderer, "but it's also easier to discover the infringement."
