Copyrights–and All That Jazz
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He called up the book’s publisher, which said that it had a contract with Matrix Software, out of Big Rapids, Michigan. Lange thereupon talked to Matrix president Michael Erlewine, head of a self-described bunch of “hippies and data freaks” who design data-base software, some of it for companies in the music biz. At an Internet site (it’s currently down, but will be back up as a World Wide Web page called allmusic.com within a couple of weeks) and a large CompuServe forum, the company tries to collect as much info as possible on any sort of popular and unpopular music: records, song lists, articles, and so on. While Matrix hires a lot of writers, it also supplements the files with excerpts from magazines like Down Beat, Jazz Is, Coda, Jazz Times, and others, which the company uses online and in the published All-Music guides. (Lange says that perhaps a thousand articles and excerpts, from something more than 150 writers, were eventually used in the book.) “We always get a signed statement [of permission],” says Erlewine.
Well, sort of. The arrangements by which writers contract with magazines and newspapers basically fall into three categories. Generally, work done by staff people of a particular magazine is owned by the magazine. Free-lancers, by contrast, generally own the rights to their work after it’s been published the first time. A third category, relatively rare in mainstream journalism, is “work for hire”: this is free-lance material to which the magazine or newspaper specifically buys permanent rights.
The amount of money involved is very small, and the writers aren’t going to sue; but negotiations with the magazines continue. Lange notes that incidents like this will become increasingly common in the near future. “We don’t know what the shelf life of the material on the electronic network is,” he says. The National Writers Union might offer the journalists some help as well. “They want to be in on whatever legal precedents are being set,” Lange adds.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/Bruce Powell.
