Nearby Café Home > Literature & Writing > WordWork



Assorted Correspondence

Don't Give the Bad Guys a Free Forum
by A. D. Coleman

October 5, 1995

 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.

Copyright © 1995 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com