How Writers Can Protect Themselves

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Coyright Protection
There are several roads that writers can take to protect themselves when they negotiate a contact or find their work online when they don't think that the database had any right to put it there.
Paret of the answer is joining one or both of the two organizations developed to respond to publishers' contention that it is too difficult for publishers to pay royalties for a subsidiary use of a writer's work.
Authors Registry was co-founded by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Authors Guild, the Association of Authors' Representatives and the Dramatists Guild. It offers a central directory of authors and a simple accounting system for paying royalties to registered writers. Since august 1996, the Registry has paid out more than $400,000 in royalties to its members for such magazines as Harpers, The Nation, Publisher's Weekly, Technology Review, Cooking Light, Travel & Leisure and Yankee. These publications use the Registry to direct payments to writers for online, database and CD-Rom publication.
Authors Registry
330 W 42nd St.
New York, NY 10036-6902
Phone (212)563-6920
Fax (212) 564-5363
registry@interport.net
http://www.webcom.com/registry

The Publication Rights Clearing-house, founded by the National Writers Union, has signed a contract with one of the largest databases, UnCover, a fax-delivery service accessible over the Internet that offers millions of articles from thousands of magazines and newspapers. It is owned by Knight Ridder. Under the royalty agreement, UNCover pays PRC $2.25 every time a registered writer's work is delivered to a customer. PRC passes about $2 of that royalty to the member.

Publication Rights Clearinghouse
337 17th, Suite 101
Oakland, CA 94612
Phone (510) 839-0110
Fax (510) 839-6097
nwu@nuw.org
http:www.nwu.org/nwu
Beyond that, Terry King, operations manager for the Registry, suggets that writers explore various databases. When they find material there for which they can prove they own the copyright and they have a contract with a publisher that states that, they should appraoch the publisher as well as the database.
The CEO of Northern Light, David Sues, says his company is indemnified and they won't make any change unless the publisher gives that directive, but King says not every database operates that way. According to King. "If enough writers start pointing out situation that breach copyright, they are going to create very uncomfortable environments for these people and make them have a deal with this issue. No one wants to be sued; no one wants someone calling them up and accusing them of breaking the law. If a number of writers make that accusation to the same database company or the same Internet article-selling site, then it starts to be a headache. We have seen database companies react to authors by going to a publisher and saying 'If you don't clear this up, we are going to have to drop your magazine because we can't deal with it."

·(E&P Web Site: http://www.mediainfo.com