TOWARD ASSET SHARING

In kicking off Tuesday’s session on digital asset management, Bob Kurtz of KPMG LLP cited a Forrester study that predicted DAM’s near-term future. According to the report, 1999 was the year of "point solutions," while 2000-2001 will be the years of "asset sharing."

The next speaker not only proved him right, but also brought the point home in a detailed case study. Rachel Coates, manager of news systems for The New York Times, purchased Canto Corp.’s Cumulus and T/one Corp.’s Merlin to handle images in a production environment and an archive, respectively. Her goal for 2000 is "to develop an overall strategy for a unified, integrated approach to DAM."

One part of that strategy will undoubtedly involve integrating the two point solutions, each of which has very specific plusses and minuses, according to Coates.

Cumulus, which the Times brought online in early 1998, performs well, boasts a flexible database structure, and is easily customized using scripts. On the downside, Coates said, Cumulus users can (and do) delete entire categories in the database. She also has concerns about the scalability of the system and Canto’s dedication to the newspaper market.

The Times’ Merlin archive contains photos dating to 1993. It is feature-rich, and T/one understands newspaper work flows, said Coates. The minuses? A single large file system that is not easily partitioned, dependence on a single platform (Microsoft Windows NT), and, again, questionable scalability.

Moving beyond the systems themselves, Glenn Cruickshank discussed an effective tool to transfer assets among them--the News Industry Text Format. A senior manager for KPMG, Cruickshank defined NITF as a standard to exchange information between news applications.

NITF is based on another hot standard--extensible markup language, or XML, and is defined by NAA and the International Press Telecommunications Council. Cruickshank predicted NITF will save much of "the enormous amount of time and money the industry uses to code data." He also noted that further information on NITF can be found at www.nitf.org or www.iptc.org.

NAA Staff Attorney Toni Gilbert closed the session with a discussion of electronic rights and permissions. Of particular interest, she said, is a recent case in which six free-lance writers sued a number of newspapers and owners of electronic databases. The free-lancers maintained that they owned the copyrights to the stories they wrote. The newspapers, on the other hand, argued the stories are merely components of the newspaper as a whole, which they own.

The court sided with the free-lancers, stating that the publishers were violating their rights by allowing their writing to be published via electronic databases such as Lexis/Nexis. Experts believe the ruling also extends to works published on World Wide Web sites, Gilbert said.

How can newspapers protect themselves? Gilbert offered the following suggestions:

o Review your agreements with free-lancers. Do they include a clause in which the free-lancers transfer copyrights?

o If you are in violation, contact counsel immediately. You may be able to work out an agreement with the free-lancer, which could include additional compensation. Or you may have to remove the electronic version of the story from the database or Web site.

o Finally, add language to your standard free-lance contract that transfers copyright to the newspaper, or at least protects your right to publish the story in a database or on the Web.

-Clark Robinson