The Complete New Yorker
An account of the completely over-protected New Yorker
Last year, at around this time, my friend Aleks (a hopeful contributor) and I had finished our fall internships with The New Yorker Magazine. Despite its perks, we felt like celebrating. We had just spent 15 hours a week for the past three months proofing scans of every page of every issue of the publication. The project, headed by the magazine's general counsel Edward Klaris, was to produce a complete digital archive of the magazine. So, starting from 1925 and ending close to the present, we squinted at thousands upon thousands of New Yorker pages to ensure they would be in perfect condition for future consumers.
At the time, I didn't question why the project was led by the general counsel, or why the New Yorker - a leading publication - was bothering with cumbersome PDF files. Proofing an issue took unimaginable patience. Mobility was slow: the pages lagged when loading and zooming to read the print was often necessary. But like most interns, I shrugged it off. A couple of months later, our hard work was released to the public in the form of eight DVDs for $70.00-$100.00 (depending on where you bought it; and prices are currently dropping).
The initial reaction to The Complete New Yorker was enthusiastic. Readers were eager to get their hands on old issues. I don't blame them. Despite the untold boredoms of scan-proofing, there were exciting moments where I would stumble upon a review of George Balanchine's first year of production at the New York City Ballet. Other times, I would stop to read a short story written by a young Raymond Carver. Or I would catch references to past events through the cover illustrations: WWII soldiers in their brown uniforms, a family observing the wonders of color television, or flowery allusions to the counter-culture movement. I learned that the man you see every February was a real dandy named Eustace Tilly (Although I often joked that the true constant of the magazine was the never-ending flow of high-end liquor advertisements).
As time passed, complaints began to emerge. For many users, the 8 DVDs were difficult and old-fashioned. Swift interface with the magazine was impossible: the DVDs wouldn't allow any text to be cut or paste, searching was only allowed in abstracts or titles (as opposed to within the text), and reading issues out of chronological order required switching discs or returning to the index. Additionally, the discs could not be copied onto the hard drive and the license agreement forced users to waive their privacy rights on their viewing information (e.g. time spent viewing a page, number of times a page was accessed, IP address, and so on). "I am so profoundly disappointed," wrote a prominent blogger, Mr. Jalopy.
The culprit behind this dinosaur of technology is copyright law. Having undergone major changes in the last third of the 20th Century, copyright law has struggled to keep pace with technology in the digital world. As a result, it has forced considerable setbacks on our ability to access information in digital medium. In this instance, the copyright law of 1976 gave magazine publishers the rights to print collections or revisions of archived issues. However, recent court rulings on the law have decided that if the magazine wishes to publish free-lance work in a new format (e.g. digital instead of print), the free-lancer must give permission and be compensated. The New Yorker, desiring a digital anthology but hoping to avoid the hassle of free-lance compensation, decided to skirt the problem by scanning the original issues onto a DVD. As Mr. Klaris said to the Wall Street Journal, "We were either prescient or stupid."
And that's not a
ll. The reason why users can't copy the DVDs onto their hard-drive is thanks to another piece of legislation called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which provides copyright protection in the form of DRM (Digital Rights Management). DRM, in this case, is what blocks the computer from copying the DVD. As Mr. Jalopy has documented, this is frustrating for two reasons. First, the term-of-service agreement allows the consumer to back up the DVDs on his or her computer. However, this is impossible because of the copyright restrictions. Furthermore, The New Yorker grants the consumer the right to return the merchandise if they find this policy unsatisfactory. But Mr. Jalopy cannot do this because of the policy on opened software.
But I digress. The nuances of this absurdity are not what is important. What is at stake is the simple fact that copyright protection has severely limited the way we can interact with technology and access content. It's unfortunate that there exists the potential for us to have a much better digital archive of The Complete New Yorker, and that this potential is limited by copyright, not technology.
P.S. For those interested, Mr. Jalopy's grumblings did not go totally unnoticed. There are some - ahem - ways to circumvent copyright protection and move the magazine onto your hard-drive.
Last year, at around this time, my friend Aleks (a hopeful contributor) and I had finished our fall internships with The New Yorker Magazine. Despite its perks, we felt like celebrating. We had just spent 15 hours a week for the past three months proofing scans of every page of every issue of the publication. The project, headed by the magazine's general counsel Edward Klaris, was to produce a complete digital archive of the magazine. So, starting from 1925 and ending close to the present, we squinted at thousands upon thousands of New Yorker pages to ensure they would be in perfect condition for future consumers.
At the time, I didn't question why the project was led by the general counsel, or why the New Yorker - a leading publication - was bothering with cumbersome PDF files. Proofing an issue took unimaginable patience. Mobility was slow: the pages lagged when loading and zooming to read the print was often necessary. But like most interns, I shrugged it off. A couple of months later, our hard work was released to the public in the form of eight DVDs for $70.00-$100.00 (depending on where you bought it; and prices are currently dropping).
The initial reaction to The Complete New Yorker was enthusiastic. Readers were eager to get their hands on old issues. I don't blame them. Despite the untold boredoms of scan-proofing, there were exciting moments where I would stumble upon a review of George Balanchine's first year of production at the New York City Ballet. Other times, I would stop to read a short story written by a young Raymond Carver. Or I would catch references to past events through the cover illustrations: WWII soldiers in their brown uniforms, a family observing the wonders of color television, or flowery allusions to the counter-culture movement. I learned that the man you see every February was a real dandy named Eustace Tilly (Although I often joked that the true constant of the magazine was the never-ending flow of high-end liquor advertisements).
As time passed, complaints began to emerge. For many users, the 8 DVDs were difficult and old-fashioned. Swift interface with the magazine was impossible: the DVDs wouldn't allow any text to be cut or paste, searching was only allowed in abstracts or titles (as opposed to within the text), and reading issues out of chronological order required switching discs or returning to the index. Additionally, the discs could not be copied onto the hard drive and the license agreement forced users to waive their privacy rights on their viewing information (e.g. time spent viewing a page, number of times a page was accessed, IP address, and so on). "I am so profoundly disappointed," wrote a prominent blogger, Mr. Jalopy.
The culprit behind this dinosaur of technology is copyright law. Having undergone major changes in the last third of the 20th Century, copyright law has struggled to keep pace with technology in the digital world. As a result, it has forced considerable setbacks on our ability to access information in digital medium. In this instance, the copyright law of 1976 gave magazine publishers the rights to print collections or revisions of archived issues. However, recent court rulings on the law have decided that if the magazine wishes to publish free-lance work in a new format (e.g. digital instead of print), the free-lancer must give permission and be compensated. The New Yorker, desiring a digital anthology but hoping to avoid the hassle of free-lance compensation, decided to skirt the problem by scanning the original issues onto a DVD. As Mr. Klaris said to the Wall Street Journal, "We were either prescient or stupid."
And that's not a
ll. The reason why users can't copy the DVDs onto their hard-drive is thanks to another piece of legislation called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which provides copyright protection in the form of DRM (Digital Rights Management). DRM, in this case, is what blocks the computer from copying the DVD. As Mr. Jalopy has documented, this is frustrating for two reasons. First, the term-of-service agreement allows the consumer to back up the DVDs on his or her computer. However, this is impossible because of the copyright restrictions. Furthermore, The New Yorker grants the consumer the right to return the merchandise if they find this policy unsatisfactory. But Mr. Jalopy cannot do this because of the policy on opened software.But I digress. The nuances of this absurdity are not what is important. What is at stake is the simple fact that copyright protection has severely limited the way we can interact with technology and access content. It's unfortunate that there exists the potential for us to have a much better digital archive of The Complete New Yorker, and that this potential is limited by copyright, not technology.
P.S. For those interested, Mr. Jalopy's grumblings did not go totally unnoticed. There are some - ahem - ways to circumvent copyright protection and move the magazine onto your hard-drive.
posted by Thessaly | 12:30 AM
4 Comments:
Isn't it partially New Yorker's fault for not wanting to deal with compensating/getting permission from its freelancers?
Well sure, there are many secondary culprits to this problem. But I suppose what I am trying to say is that the root of the entire problem is a bloated and unreasonable copyright law that makes magazines unwilling to deal with free-lancers.
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fair enough. i guess it would be kind of a pain in the ass to have to track down a century's (or how old is the new yorker?) worth of writers.
ps. on that subject, the way this whole posting thing is set up is kind of a pain in the ass too.
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