CONTENTVILLE CATCHES WRITERS OFF GUARD

By: Randy Dotinga Writers Find Their Work For Sale



Steven Brill's Contentville.com is barely a week old, but already it
has whipped up a storm over writers' rights in the electronic age.



Over the past week, several writers have discovered that their work -
ranging from magazine stories to decades-old dissertations - is available
on Contentville for a fee. What's not clear is whether the writers will
ever see a dime.



'I was amazed. Then I looked at what they were charging, and I was
angry,' said Carol Wilkie Wallace, a garden writer from Chinchilla, Pa.,
who found her dissertation about silent movie star Roscoe 'Fatty'
Arbuckle on sale for nearly $70.



Brill, the founder and CEO of Contentville, announced Wednesday that
the site will take the matter of copyright infringements seriously.
Contentville will do 'not only what the law requires but what decent
ethics require,' Brill said in an e-mail sent to Jim Romenesko of the
Poynter Institute's MediaNews Web site.



Making amends may involve taking articles off the site and paying
royalties, he wrote. He added that 'because I started out life as a
writer (and still consider myself one), I'd be plenty pissed off if I
thought I owned something and was watching as someone else sold it and
pocketed the money.'



Contentville's debut



Contentville, a spinoff of Brill's Content magazine, went online on
July 12 to offer archives of magazine articles, screenplays, dissertations,
speeches and TV show transcripts. Several prominent authors have signed
on as contributors, including Harold Bloom and David Halberstam.



Shortly after Contentville's launch, members of the Content Exchange Web
site's Online-Writing mailing list noticed some of their stories and
dissertations were on Contentville. (E&P Online columnist Steve Outing
co-founded Content Exchange, a Web site for writers.)



Much, if not all, of the material on Contentville has already been
available on various databases. But several writers on the mailing list
were not aware of that until now.



J.R. Wilson, a Las Vegas writer, searched Contentville's database and
found three of his stories about the aerospace and defense industries
dating back to 1996. He immediately e-mailed Brill and demanded to be
paid any revenues made off the stories.



Also, The Associated Press is investigating after an Associated Press
business writer found some AP stories in the Contentville archives.


'We have no relationship with Contentville. When stories appear on
somebody's Web site or for sale, we look into that,' said Jack Stokes,
a spokesman for AP.



The archived stories on Contentville sell for $2.95 each. Contentville
says its archives include articles from almost 2,000 publications,
including The New York Times, Consumer Reports, The New Republic, Motor
Trend, Civil War Times Illustrated, and Editor & Publisher.



Searching the archives



A company called EBSCO provides archive database services to Contentville.
In addition to selling stories to libraries and research centers, EBSCO
also provides archive services to Brittanica.com, the Web site of
Encyclopedia Brittanica, and Powerize.com, a business-oriented site,
said Greg Kulik, content partnerships manager at EBSCO.



At the Brittanica.com and Powerize.com sites, the EBSCO archives can be
accessed for free. However, the sites appear to offer less than Contentville.



EBSCO deals directly with magazines, not with writers, Kulik said. 'In
every case, we get the rights from the organization.'



In the case of Contentville, proceeds from the sale of articles go to EBSCO, Contentville, and the magazine publisher, said Mark Herrick, vice president
of business development at EBSCO Publishing.



Writers have also raised the alarm about Contentville's dissertation database,
provided by the Bell & Howell Co. Bell & Howell's archive of dissertations
and thesis papers date back to 1861.



Wallace, the Pennsylvania-based garden writer, said she did not recall ever
signing away the rights to her dissertation. 'That was many years of work
on my part, and of course anyone who has ever written a dissertation knows
that it costs a small fortune to complete it,' she said.



Bell & Howell pays royalties to authors and is 'very sensitive to publisher
and author rights,' said spokesman Dwight Mater.



NWU steps up



On July 17, the 5,400-member National Writers Union (NWU) jumped into the
Contentville fray. Jonathan Tasini, the union's president, wrote a letter
to Contentville expressing concern about copyright infringement.



Tasini said he was impressed by Brill's quick response. Tasini and Brill
are scheduled to meet on Tuesday to discuss copyright issues and
Contentville, Tasini said.



'He expressed his feeling that they want to make sure that the right people
are paid,' Tasini said. 'I'm cautiously optimistic that we can work
something out.'



Earlier cases



Last September, NWU members won a landmark copyright case against The New
York Times and other publications. A federal court ruled that the
publications infringed on the rights of freelancers by including their
work in electronic databases without their permission.



Earlier this month, the NWU began laying the groundwork for a possible
lawsuit against Knight Ridder and 119 newspapers whose content is on the
company's NewsLibrary database.



NWU is collecting information from free-lance writers whose work appears
on the database without additional compensation.



Tasini said the union has been also arguing for some time with Northern
Light, a prominent online archive that offers both free and for-pay
articles.



David Wallis, a New York-based freelance writer, said he found one of his
stories on sale at Northern Light for $2.95. He said writers are noticing
their work is for sale without their permission.



'I think it's a wake-up call,' said Wallis, who plans to start an online
syndication company. 'The good effect is that writers will start reading
their contracts and cross out the clauses that don't appeal to them.'