material on the web (and in other electronic media) without additional payment has been a huge issue in Montreal for some time, but hasn’t received a whole lot of coverage. Editor and Publisher Online reports today that Freelancers are picketing the Boston Globe, and I’m sure similar things have happened throughout North America. The newspaper business, in my experience, is playing hardball on this one – at least that was the case here. It’s interesting in the context of the Napster debate, because it shows the differences between how copyrights are handled. Freelance journalists generally only sell a license for first publication, but newspapers want to extend that (thus cutting into potential sales to other papers) without additional payment. In the music biz, the record company buys the copyright itself, so presumably any additional revenue stream won’t make a difference in the amount they pay the artists. That should be an issue but it isn’t.
Michael Boyle's weblog
