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In a reversal ruling by a Federal Appeals Court panel, publishers can't put freelance articles online and on CD-ROMs without permission from writers. That's a big victory for us! Thus, publishers must pay these writers, photographers, etc., extra fees to have their work thusly published, unless those rights were previously given up by the author/owner of the work.

The original suit (sometimes referred to as 'Tasini) was filed in 1993 and isn't likely totally over yet.

The lead attorney for the publisher-defendants said that he's reviewing the ruling to decide whether to ask the Appeals Court to reconsider, or to take the case to the Supreme Court. Another option would be to enter into a licensing agreement to pay royalties to writers. Gee, imagine that--getting paid for our work!

The old standby line by publishers, that electronic databases are simply revised versions of original publications and that Federal copyright law doesn't require them to pay authors extra, didn't hold up with these judges. The Appeals Panel figured it this way: Databases differ significantly because they contain thousands or millions of individual articles that can be retrieved without reference to the original publication. Therefore, the publishers must get the authors' express agreement to publish.

To read the full article: http://www.realflorida.net/asja/cwarticle.php3?this_id=178. Source: American Society of Journalists and Authors (http://www.asja.org)

Just a reminder. Data disasters can happen any time, and usually right BEFORE you were going to back up. You can back up only your data files, or the entire contents of your hard disk. Just depends on how much work you want to go through to fully restore after a hard disk failure or when upgrading to a larger disk. ZIP drives are popular backup devices but have limited storage capacity. Some folks are starting to use recordable CDs (need special hardware, but it's getting pretty inexpensive) to "burn" their own CDs. CDs can hold up to about 640Mb of data. But with today's hard disks in the 20-40 gigabyte range, you'd need 30 CDs to back up a fully loaded 20Gb disk. And, recording (writing) speeds are relatively slow. My recommendation for backup is tape backup. A single tape (TR5) can hold up to 20 gigabytes of data, and you don't have to change tapes! Practically one-button backup. But if you have a relatively small amount of data to back up (say, under 600Mb), consider getting a CDR (CD Recordable) drive, especially if ordering a new computer system. You can also use the CDR to create your own photo discs and audio compilations.

As it goes in nature, so it goes in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) world. Big fish get eaten up by bigger fish. Not too long ago, Mindspring bought the Internet assets and accounts of Netcom, so for a while it was Mindspring/Netcom. After the assimilation was complete (resistance was futile), it was once again Mindspring, but now with a much larger customer base. This time around, Mindspring is merging with Earthlink, creating the second-largest ISP after AOL. The new company will be called Earthlink.