It took only 17 years, but finally, the Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation has culminated this week with the issuance of settlement checks to nearly 2,500 freelance journalists totaling $9.5 million. The class action lawsuit, launched in 2001, claimed copyright infringement when about 600,000 newspaper articles were licensed to databases without the writers’ prior knowledge or permission. “We’ve been at the finish line for this lawsuit for a very long time, and so it is great that it’s finally happening,” Authors Guild president (and one of the named plaintiffs) James Gleick told the NYT. “But it’s also certainly a […]