"It looks like the issue of who owns what will have to be fought out in court case by case," he said. The central topic of the panel was how much control the creators of original work have over the electronic redistribution and resale of their work. There are currently no comprehensive laws protecting copyright of material availble electronically.
Menn also said that in addition to the legal issues of electronic copyright, there are ethical concerns that will need to be addressed as well. Magazine and newspaper publishers, Menn said, are in some cases unaware of the potential revenues they are losing by selling off rights to electronic databases.
Recently Menn refused to endorse a new contract requiring his writers to surrender their copyright on future work they produce for the magazine.
"I don't approve of those contracts," he said. "I refused to push them to the writers. I think it is wrong and my publisher knows that." Menn said that this trend of taking away all copyrights is alarming. "It means that more and more writers and photographers are becoming freelancers whether they like it or not," he said.
Irvine Muchnick, one of Saturday's three panelists, is leading an effort by the National Writers Union to create a royalty-sharing plan to secure the "fair use and compensation" of authors work that is resold electronically.
In December of 1993, NWU president Jonathan Tasini and ten other members filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York City claming copyright violations from the electronic resale of articles by major publishers and database operators, such as Information Access Company (IAC) in Foster City, California. The lawsuit seeks to make publishers and database operators pay royalities to the original creators each time a work is reproduced.
Muchnick claims that writers and artists must unite to fight an increasing number of large database companies, like Ziff Communications, which owns the Magazine Index found on Compuserve, out to take the profits from their work.
"We are not going after users; we are going after the big corporations like Ziff and IAC," he said. Muchnick said the lawsuit has the potential to be a "landmark" case and could reshape the future of electronic publishing. He anticipates that if the lawsuit is successful, users will eventually see the cost for retrieving articles electronically drop dramatically. "The problem is making sure that corporations don't take away this technology from users."
Magazine Index currently charges $8 for each article retrieved by fax and $3 for each article obtained electronically.
"The lawyers cannot solve this problem," he said. "The problem has to be solved by negotation. No way can we anticipate every contingency that comes up. Before we build the super highway, let's build the donkey trail." Muchnick also said that this is a unique opportunity for American writers and artists "to get ahead of the game in the global marketplace."
Steve Kaus, a lawyer for Cooper, White & Cooper, said that electronic copyright is a new area that will take some time to "iron out." Kaus said that with electronic copyright, just like with print, content can not be copyrighted, but the manner of expression can be. "Is putting something online mean it is automatically published? I don't think we know that yet," he said.