New Yorker DVD Set Delivers Everything But Flexibility, Ease

The Complete New Yorker (an 8 DVD-Rom set retailing for $100) is high on my wish list. It’s an amazing compendium with every New Yorker starting with Isssue #1 in 1925. Pick a page, any page, and get lost. But the set that has everything also comes with limitations — no keyword searches within article text, no hyperlinks, no copy and paste — courtesy of copyright law and freelance rights.
As Jessica Mintz explains and I well know as a magazine freelancer, post-1978, magazines have the right to print collections and revisions of past issues. They don’t automatically have the right to repurpose in a new format. That means contacting the freelancers again for permission and possibly paying for the rights. Most publications now require those rights be granted as part of the orignal contract but there’s a large chunk of work that falls into the gap and is causing conniptions for anyone trying to re-use that work in digital formats. The alternative: print the publications entirely, which is what the New Yorker chose.
Not that it wanted to do much else. General counsel Edward Klaris told Mintz they didn’t want to make it searchable for a varity of reasons. But other publications want to do more and are grappling with the challenges.

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