Publishers Seeking Gold give Writers the Shaft : Rights: Multimedia giants demand unlimited use of authors’ work--even for technologies not yet invented.

Every reader of modern literature builds a personal pantheon of authors--mine includes Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton, John Steinbeck, Carey Mc Williams, Emile Zola and Toni Morrison. A right they all shared was ownership of their work, profiting, however slightly, from its use and reuse. But as a technological revolution reshapes the way we work, relax and communicate, here are the names who will control authorship in the future: Time Warner, Microsoft, Westinghouse and their publishing brethren, including corporations that own newspapers.

As the cable, telephone, computing, entertainment, consumer electronics and publishing industries merge into a few monolithic corporate structures to exploit the much-hyped riches of the information revolution, a new power game has demolished longstanding relationships between authors and publishers. Instead of a fair give-and-take (where a writer might license a work for a specific use--for instance one use in print only--in return for some compensation), the word has come down from these multimedia giants to authors, demanding unlimited use in all sorts of print and electronic formats. The publishers tell us: “Here’s the contract; take it or leave it.” If we decline to give up these rights, the mega-publishers often won’t buy our work at all. They are demanding that we give up rights for technologies not even invented--even if no one can define the value of those rights. Some companies are simply stealing, selling without permission the works of writers, photographers and artists on electronic databases and CD-ROMs.

Publishers argue that income from electronic reuse is currently more more potential than actual, but the point of our protest is that we should not be forced to give away permanent rights to our work, especially for technologies that haven’t even been invented. When publishers do find the pot of gold at the end of the electronic rainbow, we have a right to share in it.

Unless the abuses we face are halted by legislation or other means, the constitutional copyright protection for authors will be dead. The people who produced the articles, books, photographs or drawings will lose control of their livelihood and some, at least, will be driven out of the business. This is a disaster for our cultural heritage.