Revaluing words

From PLN

Revaluing words

Holt's Perspectives

by Dr. Glen Holt, published February 5, 2008

Words have a value that is set as much by the context as by the person writing or saying them. Digital technology has increased--and thereby complicated--the number of costs involved in delivering words. Like other content-centered businesses, libraries play a role in determining the value of words.

Here are examples of how words are being revalued.

Let us suppose that a large urban library pays American humorist Garrison Keillor $25,000 to step on stage and say the same lines and get the same laughs as he performs in other meeting rooms and on radio stations throughout America. The value of his words is set by a contract signed by legal agents of both the library and Keillor. The library, as part of its contract with Keillor, gets to keep a videodisc of the performance that can be shown at library programs for its own audiences.

Next, suppose that Keillor a few years ago wrote a 9-minute comedy sketch for television’s Saturday Night Live for which he received $10,000. He did not appear personally, nor is the speech credited to him in the broadcast’s production credits. Under current “work for hire” laws, the SNL producer can broadcast that sketch originally and in reruns of the program. Using that same legal agreement, the producer sells the program into syndication, where it runs on domestic and international cable shows hundreds or even thousands of times. Garrison under the current “work for hire” laws receives nothing for all of these appearances.

One final example: When Keillor was young and not yet nationally known, let’s say he wrote three different articles on the nature of humor for a little known journal of social commentary published in Wales. He was paid $50 US for writing two of these. The third, he received nothing for writing.

Digital copying and distribution is changing the value of Keillor’s words written and delivered in all three contexts. Drawing from the first example, the library where Keillor performed decides to mount all of the videos from its speaker performances, including that of Keillor, on its own library website, where it can be viewed and downloaded. Finding this out, Keillor’s attorney writes the library demanding payment each time any part of the Keillor speech is downloaded from your site. He argues that Keillor never intended for the speech to be available digitally on your library’s Internet site.

In the second instance, the syndicators of the comedy sketch that Keillor wrote for SNL sell the right to broadcast the sketch over and over on a US cable television channel available in the Americas, Europe and Australasia TV and available on demand by cell phone in many countries throughout the world. In this instance, the comedy writers for SNL go out on strike because they want residual income every time their sketches are played or made available. In reality, this labor issue already has happened. The Hollywood screenwriters strike is over exactly these issues (For the latest see Variety’s Scribe Vibe Blog).

In the third instance, the National Library of Wales announces that it is going to digitize any number of Welsh journals that have gone out of print, as part of making the nation’s written heritage more accessible. Keillor’s “lost essays” in one of the Welsh journals are among those republished. A group of Welsh writers has announced that it will sue the National Library of Wales for residual rights (See BBC: Writers' digital row with library. Scores of writers are refusing to let their works be scanned for an online archive at the National Library of Wales because they are not being paid.) If that protest is successful, some value will be imputed to their previously published works, as it will to Keillor’s publications, if they were real and not fabricated for purposes of this essay.

What the three illustrations show is that the value of words is changing. Neither historians nor journalists nor librarians nor cell phone program producers nor television syndicators can assume that any speech or any quote from any graphical representation can be used without a fee. Some writers and authors who wrote or spoke or published or broadcast under prior legal agreements now are suggesting that their old words have a current and future value.

When librarians talk about “fair use” of written and spoken words in their collections, lots of writers and producers and syndicators are replying, “Your fair use is part of our problem. You brag about your circulation. You boost your audience usage of your collections by digitization. You should pay authors and producers for their work--just like the for-profit sector should pay. Fair use is broken, and only insertion of the marketplace into the equation will fix it.”

In short, the value of words has changed. In our present technological context, words have both a present and an often still unknown future value. The ownership of words’ future value and the amount of value that such words have is being negotiated and litigated as it will be for decades to come.

Academic libraries and copyright policy - Some would argue that fair use is broken for precisely the opposite reason: Ignorance and fear in the academy and elsewhere as to legitimate fair use and the role of the public domain. Lee Ann Torrans discusses some of these issues.