Work-for-hire contracts require freelancers to work under the same terms as staff writers, but without the benefits package of salaried work that provide pensions, health insurance, holiday pay and job security.
According to the National Writers' Union (NWU), Time Inc. magazines - part of the AOLTW group and publishers of more than 100 titles - have banned writers who refuse to sign these contracts.
Rob Buchanan, freelance journalist and NWU member, believes that work-for-hire contracts set a bad precedent. "If AOL Time Warner gets its way, we're taking a giant step toward an Orwellian future in which "content providers" (we used to be called writers) will eventually be forced to surrender their intellectual property rights to the companies that distribute the content. That's wrong."
The union alleges that AOLTW’s contracts for freelance journalists are fundamentally unconstitutional because they require the author to hand copyright over to the publisher. This means that the writer loses intellectual ownership of their ideas, has no further control over amendments to the work and will not receive royalties for further publication.
On its Rights for Creators website, the NWU claims that these 'rights-grabbing' contracts threaten the livelihood of many freelance journalists, who often rely on the income from royalties of syndicating and re-publishing their work. It also claims that clauses in some AOLTW contracts would still leave authors liable for the content - despite handing copyright to the corporation.
The site www.rightsforcreators.org provides detailed information on the problems that work-for-hire contracts cause for freelancers, and urges writers to lobby AOLTW - which recorded a revenue of $41 billion in 2002 - to abandon work-for-hire contracts.
In the UK and Europe, AOL subsidiary IPC Media provides freelancers with 'one-use' agreements in which authors retains copyright of their work.
In a recent case against the New York Times, Newsday and Time, the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of NWU members whose work had been resold to electronic databases. The ruling confirmed that publishers buy the rights only to the first publication.
Major news sites now often ask users to pay for online content, and the technology is available to pay royalties to authors at the point of sale; Time.com recently introduced a system called Yaga that can filter royalties directly from online transactions.
See also:
http://www.nwu.org/
http://www.rightsforcreators.org
US copyright guide for freelancers - http://www.nwu.org/docs/copyrite.htm
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