Washington - A ruling by the US Supreme Court that freelance journalists retain their copyright to articles put on newspaper databases is likely to result in a massive purge of such material, US newspaper managements say. The New York Times said it will begin deleting 115,000 articles by freelances between 1980 and 1995 from the Lexis/Nexis database because negotiating individual charges with "27,000" freelances is not practical, Patrick Smyth reports.
The court found that database reproduction represented more than the "revision" allowed for under the Copyright Act. Management sources at The Irish Times said the issue is a grey area of the law in Ireland.