In the early 1990s, I wrote several articles for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Some were tied to then-current live or recorded events (e.g., a piece on Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella; another on the VHS release of old Firestone Hour telecasts; another on two rising young tenors, Ben Heppner and Roberto Alagna), but a couple were lengthier essays that addressed the condition of opera as an artform. They at once summed up themes I had been working through in reviews and articles for a number of years, and prefigured some of the main lines of argument in my recent book, Opera as Opera.
At that time, the NYT entered into a contractual agreement with independent authors that sought to reserve to the Times all reproduction rights, including electronic ones, in perpetuity, with no further compensation to the author. When I resisted this for what I’m sure are self-evident reasons, Jim Oestreich, then the section’s music editor, was able to extend to me the apparently seldom-invoked “Joyce Carol Oates Clause”—named, obviously, for a resister with clout. This wasn’t actually a clause, but an omission of the usual blanket surrender of author’s rights. (That’s why, at least the last time I looked, although you can find these articles listed in the cumulative NYT index, you won’t find them available for perusal or download, even for a fee.) In effect, I sold to the Times, in the words we all used to type in the upper right-hand corner of Page 1 of any free-lance submission (3¢ a word for the pulps and Westerns!), “First North American Serial Rights Only.” According to that understanding, following the initial publication all rights revert to the author, in this case me. So while some publications I have written for (the Financial Times, Opera News, Musical America) are still up and running and would presumably seek to control materials they have published, even in the absence of any written agreement, and others (High Fidelity, Opus, Keynote, The Musical Newsletter) have long since ceased publication and may or may not still exist as legal entities, the status of these NYT articles is clear, thanks to the JCO Clause. (I)
Footnotes
| ↑I | At some point, I may try to pick my way through the thickets of copyright and intellectual property arguments from the p.o.v. of independent creators trying to survive in our digital world. Much too big a topic for now, so I’ll just say that I’d like to associate myself with the remarks of a couple of musicians from other planets than mine, Taylor Swift (see Joe Coscarelli: “Taylor Swift Reignites an Industry Battle,” NYT, 8/23/19) and Neil Young (see David Samuels: “Sound and Fury”, NYT Magazine, 8/25/19). And for those really interested, I refer them to the books of Jarron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?) and to Adrian Johns’ Piracy/The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), which tells the whole story, beginning with how there came to be such a notion as “intellectual property” to begin with. As to copyright itself, the standby for many years was Nimmer on Copyright; an excellent current resource is Nolo’s Patent, Copyright & Trademark—I have the 10th Edition, by Richard Slim, and the company maintains an updating service at nolo.com/updates. |
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