Writers Sue Online Firms Over Royalties

SAN FRANCISCO —  A group of freelance writers has sued three major online publishing firms in federal court, demanding back royalties in a case that focuses attention on the blurred lines between e-commerce and copyright law.

The lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco seeks damages and injunctions against Illinois-based Bell & Howell Information & Learning Co., a unit of Bell & Howell Co.; Northern Light Technology Corp. in Cambridge, Mass., and Toronto-based Thomson Corp. and two of its subsidiaries, Gale Group Inc. and Thomson Business Information.

“All the clients are in favor of the distribution of knowledge, but they are against people taking knowledge without the right to do so,” Gary Fergus, the attorney who filed the lawsuit, said Tuesday.

The lawsuit comes as freelance writers are stepping up efforts to get paid when their work is downloaded on the Internet.

These writers, often among the lowest paid in their profession, also might receive a boost from a federal appeals court ruling in New York last year in an unrelated case that found that unless there was a contract saying otherwise, writers retain ownership of their work after it is published.

Database operators often pay publishers for materials and then charge users to download them from their computers. But the lawsuit, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims the three firms have violated copyright laws because the writers never signed away rights to their work and have not been paid for it.

“It is really the question of what can you sell online,” Fergus said. “It is the intersection of so-called e-commerce and copyright.”

The lawsuit seeks class-action status. Fergus estimates that more than 10,000 writers could have a potential stake in the case.

Northern Light Chief Executive Officer David Seuss said his firm’s policy was to delete any work in which an author raised copyright objections. In the last few years, the company has deleted about 25 disputed works from a database of 21 million articles, he noted.

But there is no way of knowing the details of every deal between writers and their publishers, so Northern Light relies on the supplier to make sure copyright is honored.

Representatives for Thomson and Bell & Howell declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying they had not yet seen it.