The threatened action follows last week’s US Supreme Court ruling extending copyright protection for authors to include works published on the internet and digital media. The court ordered compensation to be paid to writers whose copyright had been infringed, but it appears that in order to avoid incurring these costs the New York Times has begun to remove more than 115,000 freelance articles from its news archives.
In a statement from the Author’s Guild, its executive director Paul Aiken commented:
"The [New York] Times continues to show a deliberate disregard for the possibility of acquiring proper licenses to these works… The Times has gone to great lengths to avoid sharing some of its database revenue with its contributors, compelling many freelancers to retroactively surrender their electronic rights to their prior work without additional payment if they want to contribute to the newspaper now or in the future."
In addition, Guild president Letty Cottin Pogrebin justified its action stating that
"The Authors Guild has taken this action to protect the economic interests of our members and all freelance writers…"