Contentville.com: Selling Souls

by Brian Caterino

THE POLITICS OF the Internet often defy conventional classification. Take the Napster dispute. Supporting the large media conglomerates is the heavy-metal rock group Metallica. They oppose free music distribution because it deprives musicians of sales and royalties. Representing the last gasp of garage-band anarchism, Courtney Love posts free MP3 files of her band Hole in an attempt to bypass corporate control and forge a more direct
relationship with her audience.

While both parties to the dispute defend the freedom of intellectual property, two distinct conceptions of the connection between freedom and property are at work here. One view sees property largely as a possession, an economic good that can and should be exchanged for profit. The second view sees property primarily as a requirement for intellectual and creative development. Similar issues of intellectual property are not as far off the radar screen of academia as you might think. Copyright
attorney Dan Reidy notes, “The intellectual property owned by authors is no different that music owned by songwriters or images owned by photographers.” The debut of a new web service in July, Contentville.com, illustrates the significance of intellectual property issues. Contentville.com’s practices have resulted in a firestorm of protest over the unauthorized use of material belonging to free-lance writers and academics.

Contentville is the brainchild of Stephen Brill, creator of Brill’s Content magazine, and is backed by media heavyweights
like CBS (which owns a 35 percent stake) and NBC. Brill calls
his site “the ultimate dream store for content.” Contentville has partnered with a variety of information providers, offering a wide variety of information, not merely books in print or out-of-print books found at other commercial sites, but magazine subscriptions, articles for downloading, speeches, screenplays, legal documents, and study guides, as well as Ph.D. dissertations. Many authors and publishers, however, were surprised to find their work offered on Contentville.com, apparently without their permission and without royalty agreements. According to attorney John Shuff, “selling individual articles electronically without permission has been an industry-wide practice.”

Partnering agreements between Contentville and information
providers have turned out to be murky at best. When writers
from The Village Voice discovered their work was for sale
at the Contentville web site, they were, along with their
editors, in the dark over Contentville’s right to access their
archives. As it turns out, Contentville had partnered with
EBSCO publishing, a company that, in addition to offering
magazine subscriptions, licenses content from publishers for
inclusion in electronic databases to which libraries subscribe.
You may have one of these at your local public or university
library. Generally they are free to the public. EBSCO, however,
licensed these databases to Contentville as well, but at Contentville, articles must be purchased. The Village Voice officials claim this is an abuse of the terms of their license. They claim
they licensed their work to EBSCO for education and research
purposes only. Contentville contends its licenses are legal.

Equally troubling is the status of Ph.D. theses for sale at Contentville.com. While these dissertations have long been
available through UMI Dissertations, many authors were unaware
that their dissertations could be offered on a commercial site. This protest has been especially strong among Canadians, traditionally sensitive to the penetration of American cultural hegemony and its accompanying commercialization. Joel Duff, a graduate student at the University of Ottawa who chairs Canada’s National Graduate Council, is opposed to the Contentville connection because it leads to the “privatization and commercialization of university research.” Canadian academics want greater control over the distribution of their own intellectual creations. Louise Forsyth, president of the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation, articulates the concerns that “Canadian Intellectual Property ought be controlled in a way that at least informs Canadian scholars of what is being done with their work.”

Canadian groups have a point. Contentville.com is problematic
not simply because it sells intellectual goods, but because of the way it markets them. In association with Linguafranca, Contentville runs a monthly feature, “Dissertations Deconstructed,” featuring dissertations of the rich and famous like Bill Cosby and Madeleine Albright. The Ph.D. thesis is marketed as a trendy cultural object. With Snoopyesque eloquence, we are told, “Like a first novel, the Ph.D. dissertation is a revealingly intimate creation.” So far though, the marketing strategy hasn’t worked. Contentville representatives say here has been no rush to download dissertations.

According to the September 19th Chronicle of Higher Education,
the National Library of Canada, after consultation with interested
parties, has requested that Contentville stop offering Canadian
theses for sale. While agreeing to this request, Contentville hopes to reach an agreement in the future. Joel Duff however, looks in another direction. He wants the National Library to modify its relation with UMI and regain control over the distribution of theses and sell them for reproduction costs. Canadian groups believe that private corporations should not profit from work financed by Canadian taxpayers and by students themselves.

Progress has also been made on payment of royalties. The National Writers Union concluded a precedent-making agreement with Contentville that provides authors 30 percent of the purchase price as royalties. In addition, a group of free-lance writers recently won a $7.25 million judgement against UnCover, an on-line document delivery service, for back royalties. While UnCover paid fees to periodical publishers, individual authors were left out of the picture. The Author’s Guild has also filed suit against five other electronic database companies.

Winning royalties for Internet publishing is a significant but not a landmark achievement. Those who write for a living, in whole or in part, deserve fair compensation. Free-lance writing, for example, often pays less than poverty wages. This angle of vision, however, blurs bigger questions about the commercialization of the Internet and its effects on the availability of research. What will happen if educational materials on the Internet are licensed to content providers? The answer is simple: only those with money will be able to do research.

Finding Courtney Love and the Canadian National Graduate Union on the same side of the fence may seem a bit surreal, but I tend to think that a little anarchism is good therapy against commercialization. Creative activity does not flourish when exclusively controlled by market forces. Such activity requires free public spaces, which are sometimes disorderly and subversive of commercial values. Yet the commercialization of academic work is a growing trend not only on the Internet. The traditional methods of transmitting knowledge to the educated public, such as academic journals and books, are also becoming profit driven. While many books are still being published, there is an increasing hesitation to take risks on work that may contribute to knowledge but will lose money. Under these circumstances, I think we need to experiment with new, perhaps more direct ways of making knowledge public.