From Playboy to the Financial Post, print publications are continuing to move onto the iPad. But as publishing platforms expand, the industry is finding “a new way to exploit work,” says Giuseppina D’Agostino, founding director of IP at Osgoode Hall Law School. She thinks we’ll be seeing more cases like freelancer Heather Robertson’s, who sued publishers Thomson Reuters Canada Lmtd. and CTV Globemedia Publishing Inc., for publishing her work on electronic databases without compensation or consent. Despite the eventual success of such cases, D’Agostino maintains lawsuits are not the way forward. Her solutions to publishers exploiting the ambiguity of copyright contracts can be found in her book,Copyright, Contracts, Creators: New Media, New Rules. Released in 2010, it evaluates the efficiency of current copyright law, with a specific focus on freelance journalists working in the digital world.

Copyright issues surrounding digital media aren’t new. Why do you think your book has garnered so much attention now, years after some of these issues first arose?

While the issues are not new, they still haven’t made the mainstream discourse and debate, especially in Canada.

The forward to your book notes that how freelancers have fared under copyright law, and according to new technologies, is a neglected field of legal academic research. Why do you think that is?

In large part, an explanation is the owner-centric nature of the debates. You have owners against users, and the creators often get lost in that dichotomy. One thing users tend to do is they put creators and owners together as having the same interests, and therefore in opposition to theirs. I want to ensure that at the very least there’s a strong distinction.

How have you seen your book make a difference in these issues so far?

Well, number one, I was one of the first witnesses called on C-32 [Canada’s copyright modernization act]. So I have the attention of parliament – they saw it as important to invite me, because they saw that my perspective is different. Also, I think it’s galvanizing creator and author groups more. I’ve noticed since my book’s come out, there’s been so many more speaking invitations because there is more of a general interest in the community for a scholarly base on this issue. The Writer’s Union of Canada got together – and this is a solution I proposed – to come up with some best practices and guidelines. The proposal is still in discussions.

The final chapters in your book focus on the solutions you propose to amend copyright law and contracts. Can you tell me a bit about those solutions?

The law will set the tone and principle, but then there also has to be solutions outside of the law, so industry practices, guidelines, soft-law things.

How do guidelines and industry practices work in accordance with the law?

Guidelines don’t have the binding force of the law. What it does is it gives some clarity to the relations between authors and publishers, as to what the practices should be, and they do it in a user-friendly way. Try and read the copyright act, and see if you can make any sense of it. They set out to discourage certain types of behaviours, they encourage certain behaviours, and generally they set principles to enable and offer inexpensive and flexible solutions to facilitate contracting. So it’s pretty much like a law, but it’s made by the users themselves – the people, the citizens, the artists – that need clarity. A freelancer would have an understanding of what the basic rules of play and engagement are so at least they start from some position of power. Education is the number one thing.

You also address the history of copyright law in your book. How has it set the standard for what we’re seeing in the inefficiency of copyright law in today’s media landscape?

Well, the history is forgotten. What I would really like to see is an evaluation and an understanding of all of our practices. In the 1920’s when silent picture films became talkies, there was litigation, and even going back further than that, when you had the printing press, there was litigation. So often when there’s new technology, there were bubbles of disputes and litigation. That’s never going to go away, and I’m not saying it should, but at least have a mechanism in place in our law to be able to tackle those bubbles when they happen.

What kind of mechanism would help tackle copyright disputes?

One thing that I would really like – and this is a very basic thing – is a default rule that basically says any ambiguity in the contract should then favour the weaker party, which is the writer. So it gives the publisher incentive to specify clear terms, and it also addresses the fundamental issues between publishers and authors, which are information asymmetry and inferior bargaining power.

What about some of the more recent contracts, such as the one put out by Transcontinental in 2009, in which I think it’s pretty clear freelancers are giving up all of their rights when signing the contract?

That’s a good example. I think there there’s likely going to be litigation on that. There’s a good case for freelancers to sue them.

Even if they’ve signed the contract?

Even if they’ve signed it. Imagine, five or 10 years from now, there’s going to be a new means of technology, something else unimagined in the context of this time that is going to re-new different challenges, different means of exploitation, different sources of money. It’s unfair to assume that the freelancer would have wanted to give those rights up.

*Please note quotes have been edited for length.

Now that Dawna Friesen has been anchoring Global National since the fall of last year and with Lisa LaFlamme replacing Lloyd Robertson on CTV News in the next few months, Jenna Wootton asks the question : Do anchors still matter? Check out the RRJ Summer 2011 cover story in print or online in the coming days.

Bruce Gillespie is an award-winning writer, whose work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Chatelaine, Financial Post Business, and Canadian Geographic. Now a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University’s Brantford campus, Gillespie previously freelanced full-time for eight years and says one of the trickiest parts about it is learning how to manage your finances.

Switch it up:

Don’t just think creatively when pitching stories—also think practically. Freelancing isn’t all about what you want to write or where you want to get published; it’s also about paying the bills. “My experience is that newspapers pay more quickly than magazines, and that corporate work pays quicker and better than any media outlet,” Gillespie says.

Pitching stories of different lengths and to different markets can help ensure a more steady flow of income.

Have a back-up:

Despite Gillespie’s previous tip, it is likely there will still be times when all of your cheques will come in at once, and times when you won’t have any at all. He suggests getting a line of credit. It’s an easy way to access money until your payment does come in. The benefit is that the interest rates are much lower than those charged for taking money off credit cards or getting cash advances.

Do it yourself:

The one software program that Gillespie bought religiously was TurboTax Canada. It simply walks you through a question-form based on what you spend on your business. Gillespie’s always been interested in doing his own taxes and bookkeeping because, if he shipped it all off to an accountant, he says, “I wouldn’t have as clear an understanding of which tax write-offs and breaks are the best payoffs in terms of reducing my taxable income.”

Learning he could write off 50 percent of a meal with clients made him more likely to meet them for coffee or lunch, benefitting his ability to network. To find out what you can write off, talk to an accountant or look at the tax guides on Revenue Canada’s website, which Gillespie says are surprisingly simple.

Stay on top of things:

Regardless of how involved you want to be in the process, you still need to be able to tell your accountant your income and where it came from. You also have to save business-related receipts if you plan to write anything off.

Keeping on top of things doesn’t have to be complicated. To track everything, Gillespie used “the most basic Excel spreadsheets you could imagine.” Tracking your income and expenses weekly or monthly makes the process a lot less painful than trying to sort everything out when tax time comes.

Don’t forget to save:

When you’re freelancing, no one takes income tax off your pay and gives it to the government. Gillespie says one of the best tips he ever received was to take 10 to 15 percent off every paycheque and stick it into an account that isn’t easily accessible through a debit card. That way, when tax time rolls around, you’ll be sure to have the money the government’s looking for. If you can’t pay your taxes on time, the penalty fees are extremely high and you may have to rely on a line of credit or loan, and you’ll end up owing even more.

TODAY: journalist David Hayes

A freelance journalist based in Toronto, Hayes’s work has garnered him seven National Magazine Awards. He’s written for various publications, including The Walrus, The New York Times Magazine
and Toronto Life. He also teaches Advanced Feature Writing at Ryerson University’s Chang School of Continuing Education.

Gay Talese: “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Esquire, April 1966)
“Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ is so obvious, probably several others would suggest it, but I guess that’s OK, a bit like all those ‘Greatest Albums Ever’ lists that almost all have Sgt. Pepper as
number one, then Rubber Soul, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde or Highway 61, and the Stones’ Exile on Main Street as the next four, in slightly different orders depending on the list. It’s justifiably called the greatest magazine profile ever written—solidly researched and reported, against all odds, since Sinatra wouldn’t cooperate with him, and beautifully written. Although there are many that are arguably as good, including a couple by Talese himself, like his profile of former boxer Joe Louis.”

Michael Paterniti: “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy” (Esquire, July 2000)
“In non-fiction narrative writing, one common model is the reconstruction. Writers, through masterful researching and reporting, craft a feature about events that happened years, decades or even centuries earlier, including in it scenes that read as though the writers were there, watching events unfold. Paterniti’s ‘The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy’ is probably the most powerfully atmospheric of any feature reconstruction I’ve read. A feat of impressive reporting, it uses the techniques of fiction—voice, symbolism, a sophisticated structure, interior monologues, the use of characters rather than journalistic sources. Show the text to someone in a form other than the way it appeared in Esquire and I would think most would assume they were reading short fiction.”

“Being a Black Man” (The Washington Post, 2006)
“Sometimes ambitious multimedia projects fail because the text elements, or the broadcast clips, or the still images seem to be most effective. Individual parts work better than the whole. This massive 2006 project by The Washington Post was the first multimedia story I’d seen that I thought accomplished everything it was meant to. It’s an in-depth look at what it means to be a black man in contemporary America. There are tough issues addressed and incredibly tender moments, and it doesn’t focus only on crime, rappers and sports figures. In fact, although the theme is obviously racial identities, the series often goes beyond that to explore simple humanity.”

Gary Smith: “The Deadly Dive” (Sports Illustrated, 2003)
“I’d say Gary Smith’s ‘The Deadly Dive,’ although you could pick pretty much any of Smith’s pieces. I’ve never read any writer who more consistently gets deep beneath the surface of his subjects than Gary Smith. Because his work mainly appears in Sports Illustrated, he’s known by many as a ‘sportswriter,’ but that’s like saying Graham Greene was a ‘spy novelist’—it misses entirely the complexity and sophistication of the writer. This one is distinctive because of the subject matter. It’s about Cuban Pipin Ferreras, the world’s greatest free-diver, and his girlfriend, Audrey Mestre, who shares his passion for the sport and died in 2002
while attempting to break the record for the deepest dive by a woman. Smith describes free-diving as ‘a man atop a 56-storey building who’s heading all the way down to the cellar, then back to the
roof, only the building is water, all water, and he has no scuba tank.’ It’s pretty clear only the most insanely obsessed would pursue an activity like this, and Smith is the perfect writer to explore the contradictions and paradoxes of this couple. His style—an omniscient narrator who floats in and out of his characters’ heads and often speaks directly to readers—is unique and takes the ‘literary’ in literary journalism as deep as the divers.”