Industry & Advocacy News
June 12, 2014
After 14 years, on June 10, 2014, we have received final approval from the U.S. Distinct Court, Southern District of New York, of our multimillion class-action settlement in In Re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation. While there is a 30-day period to appeal any objections made at the final hearing, we still believe that Authors who filed valid claims in accordance with the initial settlement in 2005 will receive payment sometime this year. There is nothing any of the claimants need to do at this point except deposit your checks when you receive them.
The Authors Guild, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Writers Union, and 21 freelance writers brought the class-action suit in 2000 on behalf of thousands of freelancers whose stories had appeared in online databases—including those run by The New York Times, Dow Jones, and Knight-Ridder—without their consent. In 2005, a negotiated settlement that pegged award amounts to whether an article had been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office was challenged by 10 authors who had not registered their works. Their challenge eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which decided in favor of the class action litigants in 2010, clearing the way for the revised settlement.
The amounts that will be paid to individual writers depend on a number of factors: the original fee paid for the article, the year it was published, whether the writer registered the copyright and whether he or she agrees to future use of the article in the databases. Defendants have agreed to pay writers up to $1,500 per work for registered stories. Writers who failed to register their copyrights will receive up to $68.40 per article. The revised settlement sets a minimum award level of $10 million in payments to writers, the same floor that was set in the 2005 settlement.
More information regarding exactly when payment will soon be available at www.copyrightclassaction.com.
