For publishers reeling from a recent Supreme Court loss, it's time to pay freelancers whose work has been republished in electronic databases without their permission.
But rather than pay up or face billions in liabilities, publishers are deleting tens of thousands of freelance articles spanning decades. So who will bear the brunt of that extra work?
"The librarians, of course," said Tim Rozgonyi, assistant technology systems editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "The librarians will save the publishers' bacon by cleaning up the data."
News librarians will be the ever-watchful guardians at the digital doorway, protecting the publisher from potential lawsuits by ensuring that stories sent don't infringe upon freelancers' copyrights, Rozgonyi said.
These file-shovelers must sift through past and present articles sent to vendors such as Lexis-Nexis to make sure these electronic databases comply with the recent Supreme Court decision in Tasini et al. vs. the New York Times et al.
That's a huge task for news librarians who send a large volume of content to multiple vendors.
But while some see this new role as a burden for understaffed libraries everywhere, others see it as an opportunity to boost the news librarians' reputation as custodians of knowledge and copyright.
"Tasini is the closest thing to a lifetime employment guarantee for news librarians that you will ever see," Rozgonyi said.
Not all news librarians have seen an increased workload with the Tasini ruling, however. In anticipation of the ruling, many publishers have been filtering content since the early 1990s, when they realized e-rights would be an issue.
Some newspapers changed their contracts to get permission to use past freelancer works published electronically. Others have created two separate archives —- one in-house and another where articles are fed to vendors such as Lexis-Nexis for public view.
While the Tasini ruling may flood some librarians' desks, many agree that a bigger concern is that these deletions may create permanent holes in the archives.
"We just feel it would be disastrous if you have holes," said Jody Habayeb, archive and research manager for The Tampa Tribune in Florida.
The reality is, most newspaper archives do have holes. Many news organizations use wire stories from sources such as Associated Press and Reuters to fill pages. Most papers send only a portion of total stories to databases such as NewsBank and Lexis-Nexis.
"I think there is a need for some rational thought as to how to approach this, rather than removing content from the databases," said Leigh Montgomery, librarian for The Christian Science Monitor. "We all know that articles have an extended life through online archives, and this limits their distribution and possible impact they might continue to have."
Some say one solution would be for publishers to post citations only, rather than the full text of articles that don't comply with the Tasini ruling.
But just listing citations instead of full text would be a disservice to readers, others say. Most users don't want to have to go through a third party to find an article online.
"I hate to see it go that way, but it's an option," Habayeb said. "The beauty of the Internet is the immediacy of it."
"The only answer for the future has to be the contract," she said. "If (there are holes in the news record), the people who will suffer the most (are) the public in general."
Some newspapers are turning to microfilm to digitize a complete archive of their collections. According to the Tasini ruling, microfilm preserves the exact layout of a collective work, whereas with digital records, users can retrieve individual articles separate from their original context.
It may be possible, however, that digitizing microfilm is permissible under the Tasini ruling if the end product does not allow the search and retrieval of individual articles, according to intellectual property expert David Opderbeck.
Microfilm could be another source of legal contention in the future.
"The royalty potential (of digitizing over 100 years of microfilm) is massive," Habayeb said.
If so, the news librarians could have even more work in store for them.
