Case Study 5: Major Daily Newspaper

1/13/05: Read the FAQ on the newspaper's website concerning linking to articles and obtaining permissions to display articles on the Web. According to the website, it appears that you can link to any article that is available on their site. However, the articles are not free, except for more recent reviews. So it looks like we can link to any recent film review in the paper, and the user would be able to click that link and view the article. However, even though the reviews are free, the user will have to register with the newspaper, which is free. I wrote an e-mail to the rights and permissions department, asking for a person to contact (call on the phone) to discuss our particular case and issues. I will ask them the following questions:

How do their guidelines pertain to our project, which is showing images of documents online? Any difference as far as rights are concerned?
What about writers who are not on your staff?
Can we link to more articles for free since we are nonprofit? Are the only free links the recent reviews?
Made note to call again a week from Thursday.

1/14/05: Received an e-mail from rights and permissions specialist.  Will call him Tuesday 1/18/05.

1/27/05: Called and talked to rights and permissions specialist. He basically confirmed everything above. He said that the newspaper publisher owns everything after 1996 so there is no freelance versus staff issue in that time period. Therefore, linking is the only option. However one thing he said was the reviews "may not be complete" (this is because much of the online archive contains abridged and summary articles).  For articles before 1996, the newspaper owns virtually everything from that period too, so they would not be interested in helping us find the few instances where the material was owned by the writer. Therefore, we could link to the articles pre-1996, but the user would have to pay a fee to see it. We cannot display ANYTHING, EVER-- unless we pay a licensing fee. One small shred of hope is that he said we could send a permission request to his attention, asking for free, blanket permission, and see what happens (which I will do).

2/4/05:  Sent permissions pack, made note to follow up.

3/3/05: Received an e-mail from rights and permissions specialist saying they would only allow us to display the articles if we paid a permission fee and that, in this case, it would be a minimum of $20,000.