What did Shakespeare say about lawyers?

For now, systems types may feel like they're taking Cartography 101 as they try to satisfy the lawyers.

David Dalton, systems editor at the San Francisco Examiner, may find himself in the unenviable position of being well ahead of the pack in starting to work on an automated system for protecting his newspaper from copyright litigation.

Last November, company lawyers told Dalton that the paper must "immediately stop sending to any vendors or our own web site any free-lance or syndicate piece unless we have a signed contract that we own the on-line rights."

That involved rearranging the story flow in the library system, and case-by-case decision-making by the librarians, who rely on a list of contract signers and their rights provided by the managing editor.

Dalton sees this as only a temporary fix. In an ideal system, he said, no human would intervene.

"I always look for the simplest, cleanest solution," he said. "This is messy. It needs to be clean, automatic, and reliable."

Dalton believes that future programs will examine a header field on the editorial and library front-ends for a clear indication as to whether or not on-line rights have been purchased. Such a field will have been filled in by originating editors.

But because human error can be costly, he would also create an authoritative central database that librarians could check manually for any author's contract status.

Right now, Dalton is exploring the feasibility of creating such a process on the Examiner's legacy editorial system from System Integrators Inc., possibly drawing from the programming capabilities of CPL -- which may or may not run on the library system.

For now, though, he feels like he's mostly alone in a very big boat.

-- LCC

See also: On-line brings a struggle over electronic rights, copyrights

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.