Editor
ASJA Newsletter
To the Editor:
Having worked for Joanne Harris
and American Visions, I strongly object to having
her self-serving bullshit sponsored and published
by the ASJA without any challenge. Here's my horror
story:
On January 3, 1993, I signed
a contract with Dialogue Diaspora, then listed as
publisher of the magazine American Visions: The
Magazine of Afro-American Culture, committing
myself to providing for the magazine an original feature-length
article on the photographer, filmmaker and writer
Gordon Parks.
Initially, the magazine attempted
to sneak past me a work-for-hire contract that would
have granted them copyright and all subsequent rights
to this essay. I refused. The revised version of the
contract eventually negotiated via telephone between
myself and editor Joanne Harris, and signed by both
of us, contains instead a clause (initialed by both
parties) in which I as Author "license first
North American publication rights only to this essay,
with no other rights implied."
Said essay was submitted by
the deadline, edited to our mutual satisfaction, and
published in Vol. 8, no. 1, of the magazine, datelined
February/March 1993, under the title "Gordon
Parks: Soulscapes." I subsequently was paid in
full -- a modest but not unreasonable fee, $650 for
1200 words -- for that usage of this essay.
On September 21, 1995, while
visiting Staten Island Technical High School as a
guest speaker in conjunction with the New York is
Book Country Street Fair, I had occasion during a
class break to spend a few minutes in the school's
Media Center. Up and running on one of their computers
was a program called "InfoTrac SuperTOM+ 1985-1995.
" This program, a software program on CD-ROM
published by the Information Access Company (A Thompson
Corporation Company), 362 Lakeside Drive, Foster City,
CA 94404 (T. 800-227-8431; F. 415-378-5369), was a
large database containing bibliographic references
to articles from many periodicals. Additionally, it
contained abstracts of some of those articles -- and,
in a number of cases, the actual texts of those articles.
Entering my own name into the search program, I found
myself listed twice. One listing was simply a bibliographic
reference to an article of mine in an issue of Popular
Photography; the other was the complete text of
my essay on Parks, credited accurately as having been
published in American Visions, with the following
copyright notice: Copyright 1993 Visions Foundation.
Thus, without my knowledge
or permission, in blatant violation of my copyright,
with no recompense to me, and with a false, deceitful
and illegal claim to copyright on behalf of the "Visions
Foundation," my essay on Gordon Parks is being
marketed internationally in the form of a CD-ROM program
(in addition to the CD-ROM form, this database is
available on-line through CompuServe, AOL, and other
servers).
I have initiated inquiries
that I expect to lead to some satisfactory resolution
-- including payment -- from the various parties involved
in this clearcut case of copyright infringement. However,
this experience makes several things clear:
- Harris and her publisher
should not be trusted by anyone: they lie, they
cheat, and they steal.
- Their policy of demanding
all rights to a writer's labor -- and their practice
of making off with those rights by stealth when
they can't trick a writer into surrendering them
contractually -- makes their opinion of writers
clear. To them, we are slaves. One would hope for
better from a publication that bills itself as "The
official magazine of the African American Museums
Association," but here's a sad truth: there's
no nobility or morality inherent in melanin.
Given this experience, you
can imagine my dismay at seeing Harris given part
of an ASJA-sponsored dinner meeting, and space in
our newsletter, to babble about "soul food for
the brain," without any of the ASJA's dinner-meeting
organizers confronting her over the magazine's reprehensible
policies and practices -- especially when the magazine
"pays on pub and has been on our Warning List,"
as your Editor's Note makes clear. How do you justify
such sponsorship? From my standpoint, this is sleeping
with the enemy, and I resent having to pay a share
of the hotel bill for other members' liaison.
I would strongly suggest --
indeed, I formally propose -- that the organization
adopt a policy that prohibits invitation to any and
all publishers, editors, or others in the field who
have been cited by our members for professional misbehavior
as speakers or panelists at or participants in ASJA
functions, except in contexts where discussion of
that misbehavior is established from the outset, in
the invitation itself, as the first item on the agenda.
I find it deeply offensive to have my dues money used
not only to buy them dinner but to provide them with
a validating platform for their self-promotion, and
for the creation of contexts in which the organization
and some of its members suck up to such bastards,
dignify their unprofessional tactics with our invitation,
tolerate that behavior with our silence, and allow
them (legitimately) to use the ASJA name henceforth
as an organization that has "approved" them
by offering them a forum without demanding that they
justify practices and policies we oppose.
You want to play Little Miss
(or Mr.) Round-heels to sleazeballs like this? You
actually want to feed them? Fine. Not on my
dime, say I.
Yours,
/s/ A. D. Coleman
In slightly edited form, this
letter appeared under the title "Don't Give the
Bad Guys a Free Forum" in the ASJA Newsletter,
Vol. 44, no. 11 (December 1995), p. 20. This publication
is the newsletter of the American Society of Journalists
and Authors.