What's Your Take on Tasini?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August, 2001 by Sheree Callahan

It made headlines and rattled nerves as it made its way through the courts. But now that the Supreme Court has issued its ruling on Tasini v. The New York Times, publishers--asked how the ruling will affect the way they do business with freelancers--are confident and composed.

Norb Garrett

Editorial/creative director EMAP/Action Sports Group

The Tasini decision will have little or no effect on the way we do business with freelancers, because from the outset we carefully avoided conflicts online by setting a policy not to post anything without consent. The same policy holds true with any other brand extension projects (books, CD-ROMs, etc.) that we might undertake. Sure, we've had situations where mislabeled credits on photographs have arisen, but in those instances we deal fairly and swiftly, either paying a proper buyout or removing the image/text from the site/product. Our magazines rely heavily on freelancers, and because of that we put their best interests first in any reprint/repackaging effort we undertake.

Terry Adamson

Executive vice president The National Geographic Society

The clarification of the respective rights of authors and publishers under the Tasini case is important for The National Geographic Society--which is a defendant in several pending lawsuits alleging copyright infringement based on the reproduction of freelance articles and photographs in The Complete National Geographic, a 30-disk CD-ROM set that reproduces every page of every issue of National Geographic exactly as it previously appeared in print.

The Tasini Court held that the media defendants in that case had infringed the copyrights of the plaintiff freelance authors by reproducing "articles standing alone and not in context, not 'as part of that particular collective work' to which the author contributed." Although the Court ruled in favor of the freelance plaintiffs in that case, its reasoning bolsters National Geographic's position in the pending litigation. The Complete National Geographic reproduces all texts and photographs in the precise context in which they originally appeared in print.

The National Geographic Society filed an amicus brief in support of the publishers in Tasini, and now plans to petition the Supreme Court for certiorari in Greenberg v. National Geographic Society, one of the pending cases addressing The Complete National Geographic on CD-ROM.

Robin Bierstedt

Vice president and deputy general counsel Time Inc.

Since the mid-1990s, publishers have had contracts in place that cover the rights at issue. In most cases, they have a work for hire agreement--at least that's the case for Time Inc. What we are dealing with are the years between the beginning of Nexis and the end of 1994. We believe that the only solution at this point is to delete those freelance articles in which we don't have the necessary rights. If we hear from freelancers who wish to have their articles reinstated after we have deleted them--realizing that we are not going to pay them any additional money--we can certainly accommodate those wishes. But we are not going to seek out the hundreds or maybe thousands of freelancers. It is just too difficult.

Rex Hammock

President and CEO Hammock Publishing

As a small publishing company, we have a small staff of editors and writers, but make use of a broad network of freelance writers and photographers. We have for the past couple of years been very clear with freelance writers--in written form--on how we use their work. This case just reinforces the importance of smaller as well as larger publishers having a clear understanding with the freelance writers they use. We typically have the right to publish [their work] in our publications, Web-related publications and in the archives of the Web publications.

If we receive requests to reprint those stories, we turn those leads over to the original writer. We work on their behalf to share in any of the revenue that is generated from the resale of that material.

John Papanek

Editor in chief and vice president ESPN The Magazine

The Tasini case mainly affects publications and their freelanced work before the mid-nineties. From our launch in 1998, our outside-writer agreements have allowed us to post freelance articles on our Web site and to maintain them in our electronic archives.