JOHN VIVIAN: Former TAA president "These publishers were so greedy eyed at the prospects of wringing new profits from electronic revenue streams that their business models overlooked authors -- the people who create the content for this new revenue stream." Brill breakthrough gives textbook authors a negotiation model for download sales."

Authors have new heroes: Steve Brill, the maverick creator of American Lawyer, Brill's Content and now contentville.com, and Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union. Together they crafted a breakthrough arrangement on electronic royalties that, if all authors and their professional organizations capitalize on the deal, will reshape the future of publisher-author relations and help bring overdue equity to the relationship.

While the publishing industry has largely squeezed authors and other content creators out of the windfall profits from recycling stories for electronic distribution, Steve Brill agreed to a Tasini proposal in August for a 30 percent royalty rate. It is a model that other publishers should adopt immediately and end the growing number of law suits by authors whose works the publishers are exploiting.

Defendants in the growing bevy of suits include the Atlantic, Bell & Howell, the Boston Globe, Dialog, Dow Jones Reuters Interactive Knight-Ridder, the National Geographic Society, Newsday, the New York Times, Northern Light, Reed Elsevier, Time Warner, Thomson, and University Microfilms. These publishers were so greedy-eyed at the prospects of wringing new profits from electronic revenue streams that their business models overlooked authors -- the people who create the content for this new revenue stream.

As these cases go to court, we expect the copyright ownership position that publishers have bullied about will crumble, as it has in Tasini v. New York Times. What should an intelligent publisher do? End the litigation. The alternative, to defend their flawed position, will cost publishers avoidable legal fees. Even stronger than the pecuniary argument for publishers to concede is this: The publishers have been on morally low ground in exploiting authors' work without, in many cases, asking permission or even offering compensation. Now they can redeem themselves, paying for past e-rights misdeeds, and be born again in the eyes of the public -- and authors.

The implications of the Brill agreement cannot be overstated.

The agreement itself deals with articles that contentville.com picks up from a variety of sources and sells to people who download them from the web. The case has obvious implications for all the databases, including Nexis, one of the oldest, but also databases operated by Knight-Ridder and many others.

Academic writers have a stake too. Many companies and learned socities that produce scholarly journals not only sell the journals but wring supplemental profits from selling reprints and now downloads -- without sharing this "found money" with authors. At $3 a download, which is typical, the sums generated from this revenue stream are staggering in the aggregate. Most academic publishers have contracts in which authors sign off all rights to their work. These are exploitive contracts, and authors and their professional organizations, including Text and Academic Authors, must insist on contract changes so academic authors share in the publishers' new e-windfalls.

Textbook publishers have moved slowly into electronic sales, but they are on the brink of offering database services in which textbooks can be chopped up and sold by components to web customers. The day is near when adopters can tell students to buy Chapter 1 and 6 from the Jones text, Chapters 4, 7 and 9 from Smith, and Chapter 11 and 18 from Vivian. Some textbook publishers already have standard contract language that gives them all the revenue and authors nothing from e-recycling. Others give one-half the royalty rate of the print book for e-distribution. In a few cases, authors have insisted on the same rate for e-variations as in the p-book, but not even that is fair and reasonable considering that spinning off an electronic variation takes hardly any new capital. Every book today is put into type in a way that converts easily to e-distribution.

Is 30 percent a magic e-royalty rate? Tasini says it is with Brill's contentville.com. We haven't seen documents from Brill's internal accounting, but Tasini, a tough negotiator, says it's more than Brill clears from download sales. How's that for a breakthrough in traditional publisher-author inequity?

A reasonable position for an author to take into negotiations is a 50-50 split of publishers' revenue from e-sales after the publishers expenses are subtracted. Publishers may be reluctant to share their internal records on their net income, but that doesn't make a 50-50 split any less reasonable.

Now, fellow authors, while publishers are on the defensive in the myriad of pending and yet-to-be-filed law suits, is the moment to capitalize on the Brill breakthrough.