To make it faster to load and read,
I made a page for each "case":
Introduction
Copyright and copywrong
"Web piracy"
The N.E.T. Act in the United States
The Church of Scientology cases
The Shetland News hyperlink case
"The day the sites went out in Georgia"
The Digital Object Identifier
Music copyright on the Internet
Are they coming to take me away?
The most recent case
concerning journalists, January 1998
Webography (references)
Procedure (what I did)
The search engine Northern Light has been criticized by freelance journalists who found their articles for sale there. Newspapers often sell articles to different archives without considering which articles were originally bought from freelancers. Northern Light says that it will remove any freelance article that publishers say have been wrongly included among articles sold, but for the freelance journalists themselves it is probably harder to get an article removed. It is important for freelancers to think about both re-sales and web publishing when they are negotiating for prices and terms.
The problem with database archives reselling articles that they have bought from publishers is not new, but with the Internet the articles are more accessible than before. In a recent article (URL below), Steve Outing wrote: "Now, writers are seeing what's been happening to them all along; the practice of reselling content is more visible." This can also sum up the question of copyright on the Internet. Very little is altogether new, most of the problems were there already. The Internet often simply means one more way to find out that someone has been making copies of your work.