Another ambiguous day in the life of a fair-use advocate. The Supremes have ruled on the Tasini case, wherein a group of freelancers sued their publishers over unauthorized use of their material on the publishers’ websites. On the one hand, I think it’s important to get material out of the realm of oxidizing vegetable matter and into the pure holiness of bytes-on-substrate. On the other hand, The NYT and company are making these archives available for business reasons — even if the archives lose money, they preserve their origin’s credibility and cachet (the Times could hardly hope to be the paper of record if its records were offline). If they’re making archives available for commercial reasons, then why shouldn’t the articles’ authors derive commercial benefit from the archives as well? It’s interesting: writers organizations like to call the denizens of alt.binaries.e-books (who scan, OCR and post entire novels to Usenet) “pirates,” despite the fact that these pirates are engaged in a totally noncommercial activity, yet writers side with their publishers in attempting to sue the pants off of a bunch of Usenet geeks. Meanwhile, publishers are really ripping off writers — taking work to which they do not own the electronic rights and putting it online with the expectation of earning money from it. Nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them, even if the other hand is holding an anal-probe.

“We want our work out there. We simply want to have our permission asked and to get paid a fair amount,” said Jonathan Tasini of the National Writers’ Union…

…”That is a loss for free-lance writers because their articles will be removed from the historical record. Historians, scholars and the public lose because of the holes in history created by the removal of these articles,” [the publisher of the NYT] said.

Link (Thanks, Pat!) Discuss