Cyber Payback

By John Greenwald With Reporting By Eric Roston/New York

The New York Times famously prides itself on publishing "all the news that's fit to print." But that slogan was coined a century before the digital age. Last week, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that freelance writers retained full rights to their work in cyberspace, the Times began to purge its electronic archives of 115,000 articles that freelancers had written from 1980 to 1995. For freelancers who don't want their work expunged, the Times set up a Web page where they can waive their rights to past articles. Says Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis: "We don't want to be considered in willful violation [of copyright laws] now that the court has ruled."

The zapping of intellectual property reflects the passions unleashed by the high court's 7-2 decision in a case that the National Writers Union brought against five publishers and database companies in 1993. Defendants include not only the Times but TIME publisher Time Inc.--which also plans to purge freelancers from its online archives--and Lexis-Nexis, a 3 billion-article database.

The purge affects only pre-1995 articles; since then, publishers have generally retained electronic rights as part of any freelance contract. The court ruling "really has to do with filling in the blanks on earlier contracts that hadn't anticipated the Internet revolution," says Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School. Those blanks having been filled, "the decision forces both sides to roll up their sleeves and negotiate."

While the writers are willing to deal, the publishers have shown scant interest in doing so. "My fervent hope is that the decision spurs companies to sit down with us and negotiate," says union president Jonathan Tasini, who plans to ask for as much as $600 billion in damages and copyright fees when a federal court considers penalties later this year. "The last thing I want to do, although we are prepared to do it, is to litigate this for the next five years." As any freelancers will tell you, they're used to waiting forever to get paid.

--By John Greenwald. With reporting by Eric Roston/New York