By: Lucia Moses New Licensing Agreement Draws Protest
Free-lancers of The Boston Globe are appealing to the public in their
fight against the newspaper's new licensing agreement.
A group of free-lancers handed out informational fliers outside the
Globe July 24 to protest the agreement, which gives the newspaper the
right to publish contributors' material on the Web without additional
payment.
The free-lancers failed to get a court injunction to stop the agreement,
but a lawsuit filed against the pact in June on their behalf is still
pending in Massachusetts Superior Court.
The Globe, which seeks to dismiss the suit, said yesterday that 498
free-lancers, or more than 70% of its most frequently used contributors,
have signed the pact. As of July 1, the paper stopped using contributors
who have not signed the agreement, Globe spokesman Richard Gulla said.
The agreement asks contributors to let the Globe publish their material
on its Web site, Boston.com, so the material in the print version matches
that of the Web site. Free-lancers would retain copyrights to their work
and could resell it outside the Globe's primary circulation area the same
day it appears in the Boston daily. Afterwards, free-lancers could sell
their work anywhere.
Free-lancers say the agreement goes too far by not paying extra for
online publication and applying to all past work.
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Lucia Moses (lmoses@editorandpublisher.com) is an associate editor for
Editor & Publisher magazine.
(c) Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher
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