Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1998

Abstract

Like many national presses in Europe, the Belgian press divides ideologically. Each daily newspaper represents the views of a political party, or expresses the perspective of a political or religious belief. Newspaper readers therefore tend to select the newspaper that most closely corresponds to their world-view. Ten publishers of Belgian dailies and weeklies formed a consortium, Central Station, to operate a website that would offer a crossection of all the participating periodicals' articles on a variety of subjects. The articles would appear in print in their separate newspapers in the morning, but would be available that evening on the Central Station website. Fee-paying users could search the website by subject, and could call up one, some, or all of the different newspapers' articles on that subject. While the publishers cooperated with each other to create and maintain the website, they neither sought permission from the authors of the articles published in the daily print editions, nor offered to pay them for the electronic dissemination of the articles via the website.

Disciplines

Intellectual Property Law | Law

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