Sometimes the claim is made with no offer of compensation for those subsidiary rights. This electronic stuff is new and we aren't making real money on it yet. True, e-rights may or may not earn big fortunes. But they already are a significant source of revenue to some publications, and others are sniffing around cyberspace and licking their chops. In recent years, hundreds of publications have begun to sublicense their content to online databases.
Users pay a fee each time they access an article.
Some publishers have begun online versions of their magazines, often including entire articles from the print editions. Reprint services, too, are in the online picture in a broad hybrid setup. Typically, the computer user finds a citation in an online index and orders the text at the keyboard. The copyright payments go to the publishers, who in the case of typical freelance articles don't own the copyright, have no legal standing to collect the money, and weren't ever authorized to agree to a reprint deal in the first place. That's your property the publisher wants to gamble with.