For Tasini Settlement, Supreme Court Wait Stretches On
Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 12/9/2008 1:01:00 PM
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Publishers and freelancers anxiously awaiting word from the Supreme Court after its December 5th conference will have to keep waiting at least until the end of this week. The court did not decide whether it would review a controversial Second Circuit Court ruling shooting down a settlement in the long-running Tasini v. New York Times case and has again listed the matter on the docket, this time for December 12.
This marks the fourth time the case has appeared on the docket for a conference. In an interview last week, one of the suit’s parties, objector Irv Muchnick, told the LJ Academic Newswire he couldn’t speculate on what the delays mean. “No one knows if this means the justices didn’t get to us in the previous conferences, or if they’re wrestling with our knotty problem with exceptional vigor.”
Although overshadowed by the Google settlement in recent weeks, sorting out Tasini, the long-running case to resolve compensation issues for freelance writers whose works were included in electronic databases without permission, remains a key steppingstone to the digital future. If the Supreme Court declines to review the Second Circuit’s decision to quash the Tasini settlement, the settlement will be all but dead. That would open the door to potential chaos in the database world, publishers argue, as they may be forced to pull articles for which they do not have rights in the face of a potential wave of individual lawsuits from authors, or, so suggests the brief from petitioner Reed Elsevier, which also embodies the views of other publisher defendants.
It has been seven years since the initial Tasini Supreme Court ruling, and 15 years since the suit was first filed. Meanwhile, events this week suggest much has changed since the case was first launched—one of the case’s main defendants, Tribune Co., filed for bankruptcy.
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