The proposed settlement was prompted by a 2001 decision from the Supreme Court in favor of six freelance authors claiming copyright infringement in The New York Times Company v. Tasini. After the Tasini decision, many freelance works were removed from online databases. Most publishers now require freelance writers to sign contracts granting both print and online rights.
After the decision, the authors, publishers and database companies who were parties to several class-action lawsuits negotiated a global settlement that would pay the plaintiffs up to $18 million.
The publishers in the suit included Reed Elsevier, The New York Times Company, the Thomson Reuters Corporation, Dow Jones & Company, now owned by the News Corporation, and Knight Ridder, which the McClatchy Company bought in 2006.
The suits involved two groups of authors — those who had registered copyrights in their works and those who had not. The second group was by far the more numerous. But the federal copyright law allows suits claiming copyright infringement only after works are registered.
Many authors supported the settlement, but some objected. The objectors said that authors who had not registered their works were treated unfairly because their share would be reduced if there was not enough money to go around.
In November 2007, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, refused to approve the settlement on grounds that had not been advanced by any party. The court said it did not have jurisdiction over the claims of the second group of authors.
Since no one in the case was happy with that result, the Supreme Court appointed Deborah Jones Merritt, a law professor at Ohio State, to defend the appeals court’s reasoning.
On Tuesday, in Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, No. 08-103, the court unanimously reversed the lower court ruling. In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court said some plaintiffs’ failure to comply with the registration requirement did not deprive the lower courts of jurisdiction to consider the settlement. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who had ruled in favor of the publishers in Tasini as a trial court judge in New York, did not participate in the Supreme Court ruling.
Charles S. Sims, who represented the database companies and publishers in the new case, said that his clients “could not be happier that the settlement has been un-derailed.” He said both the parties and the public stand to benefit.
“If the settlement goes through,” Mr. Sims said, “there will be restorations to archives that are full of Swiss cheese holes.”