By Joel Thurtell
[paypal-donation]
I’m still amazed at The New York Times thinking they can charge me to reprint a story I wrote for their newspaper 30 years ago.
It stinks.
They paid me seventy-five bucks in 1979, worth $211 in 2007 dollars.
How much do they plan to charge me to reprint my own words?
Five hundred twenty smackers!
$520.
More than double what they paid me.
What pikers!
I’d take a $309 loss on the deal.
Just because I live west of the Hudson doesn’t mean I’m stupid.
The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that those bloodsuckers ought to be paying ME a royalty whenever anyone reprints something I wrote for their paper.
What makes them think they can shake us down to reprint our own stories?
I knew The Times was desperate, but…
Turns out I’m not alone.
The Author’s Guild, of which I’m a member, has sued The Times and other online organizations in a class action asking for just what I want — royalties for secondary sales of material supplied to these publishers by free lancers like me.
But the good news for me is that I can reprint my Times story verbatim and not have to pay them a nickel. I belong to the Authors Guild and wrote our attorney, Michael Gross, about my situation. He tells me the U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether to certify free lancers like me as a class who can sue publishers like The Times for a portion of these reprint fees. Since I was a free lance writer without a signed contract with The Times, he tells me, I don’t have to pay to reprint text I wrote. It would be different if I had been a full-time employee of The Times. But I was not.
The U.S. Supreme Court already ruled in free lancers’ favor, at least where electronic reproduction of our articles is concerned.
“The presumption,’ wrote Gross, “Is that the copyright remains with you, so you obviously would not need permission to reprint the article in its entirety if this was the case.”
Well, yippee! I never signed an agreement with the Times — just dictated the text to the Times recording room and waited for the story to appear and the check to arrive.
So I get to use my own work, after all.
Well, not so fast. While I can use my words as I wrote them, I’m not free to reprint them as they appeared in The Times, which is what I wanted to do in my forthcoming book, Shoestring Reporter.
The Times layout, the headline, dateline and all that add luster to my story. Too bad I can’t use that.
But believe me, The Times made no distinction — they want to charge me for my words, period.
And believe me, I’m rooting for the Guild.
Sure would be nice if writers were paid a share of fees publishers collect on latter-day sales of our articles.
That would be something to celebrate.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
I’m not a journalist, but when I read the first post about this, I was stunned that the article was not YOUR article, but that it belonged to the paper you wrote it for. Even inventors hold patents for things they invent, even if they are working for a company and not independently. Sheesh….Greedy papers!!!!