Vauhini Vara (of the WSJ) says: “The New Yorker recently released its archives on a DVD, but the stories were scanned in their original magazine format and can’t be copied, searched, etc. The reason (from the [WSJ] story):
When Congress revamped copyright law in 1976, it said magazine publishers retained the right to print collections and revisions of past issues. But when a magazine wants to republish a free-lance work in a new and different format, the free-lancer must be compensated accordingly, two more-recent court rulings have found. That means when republishing articles on DVD or other digital formats, magazines must pay free-lancers again, get their permission to republish free — or preserve the original print context. The New Yorker’s solution was to scan the original magazine pages onto DVDs.
Reader comment: Spencer Marks says “The poster who wrote about the New Yorker DVD set has it wrong or at
least partially wrong.
“While scans of the content are propriety the content is definitely
searchable and indexed quite well. However, you have to use a program
that comes with the set to access the material. I’ve found the program to
be well done and extremely useful. The New Yorker has even offered updates
as bugs are resolved. Providing a Mac version is an unexpected treat.
“Of course the downside is that I can imagine a future where that little
program will no longer work, but when I’d still like to access all that
wonderful content. As a result of access restrictions, the content won’t
outlive the Macs or PCs it was designed to run on making the DVD set not a
particularly suitable archive.
“I can imagine many reasons why the New Yorker chose to make the content
propriety besides copyright compensation laws mention in the post. For
example, it could be as simple wanting to control access to all that
content which I don’t find all the unreasonable in this particular case.”