Self-annointed media watchdog Steven Brill is trying to appease writers across North America, including some of Canada's top wordsmiths, for having breached their copyright on his Contentville.com Web site.
"We want to do not only what the law requires but what decent ethics require," Brill says on the site. He is promising to take down articles from the site or pay the copyright holder, as soon as it is clear who that is in the murky world of cyberspace.
Contentville is an e-commerce site that sells content in the form of magazine and newspaper articles, books, dissertations and anything else "that qualifies as brain food," according to a promotional letter from Brill, who bills himself as the founder and CEO of Contentville.
Alas, the feast he is offering is tainted because a goodly portion of the content has been scavenged from magazine and newspaper archives without so much as a nod to the writers who produced the work.
Canadian writers, including novelists Margaret Atwood and Barbara Gowdy and journalist June Callwood, have been outraged ever since news of the copyright infringements began appearing on media Web sites and in an article in the Village Voice.
Writers can demand their work be removed from the Web site or work out an agreement with Contentville to pay them for the electronic use of their work. Indeed, very few writers want to stand on principle and remove their work from the Web site. As broadcaster and journalist Ian Brown fumed: "I became a writer to be known and to be paid for it. Even the scrap metal business pays for the stuff it salvages."
"I don't think we should be cast as the bad guy here for trying to create a market for this stuff," a humbled Brill wrote in a statement on Contentville.com, saying that he had licensed the materials in good faith from archive companies.