- From: Waddell, Cynthia <cynthia.waddell@ci.sj.ca.us>
- Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 10:36:38 -0700
- To: "'W3C interest group'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>, "'Multiple Recipients of List'" <uaccess-l@trace.wisc.edu>, "'ISTF-participants'" <istf-participants@lyris.isoc.org>
- Cc: "'Fergus, Gary S. (Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison)'" <gfergus@brobeck.com>
On August 15, 2000 it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that a lawsuit was filed in US federal court demanding that writers of web-published copyrighted material be paid back royalties from three major online publishers. The lawsuit is seeking payment from Bell & Howell Information & Learning Co., a unit of Bell & Howell Co., in Skokie, Illinois, USA; Northern Light Technology Corporation in Cambridge, Mass.; and Toronto-based Thomson Corp. and two of its subsidiaries, Gale Group Inc. and Thomson Business Information. According to the suit, database operators of online search engines are paying publishers for access to articles and books and are charging customers to download them from thousands of publications. However, the operators frequently pay the writers nothing. According to the San Francisco lawsuit, copyright law is violated because the authors contend that they never signed their rights away and still own their work. The new suit seeks class-action status on behalf of all writers whose works are in the databases. If you have published an article on the web and find that a search engine is selling your work without your permission, I would encourage you to contact Mr. Gary S. Fergus, attorney with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison at mailto:gfergus@brobeck.com. I have a call in to the lawfirm to request that I be joined as plaintiff since my articles on US law and policy and accessible web design are being resold without my permission. Best regards, Cynthia Waddell --------------------------------------------------- Cynthia D. Waddell ADA Coordinator City Manager Department City of San Jose, CA USA 801 North First Street, Room 460 San Jose, CA 95110-1704 (408)277-4034 (408)971-0134 TTY (408)277-3885 FAX http://www.icdri.org/cynthia_waddell.htm
Received on Friday, 25 August 2000 13:39:03 UTC