He is the self-appointed watchdog of the US media, the man who Bob Woodward once called, "the foremost serious journalistic entrepreneur of our times". His name is Steve Brill, he is the founder and former editor of Brill's Content - one-time scourge of corporate media - and now he is a fully-fledged media owner in his own right. Last month, Brill started what many new media commentators regard as one of the most exciting e-commerce launches in the US this year. Contentville.com is a massive e-publisher, selling content culled from books, magazines, transcripts and legal documents. It even claims every dissertation written for a PhD degree in the US since 1861.
The site is a pay-to-download electronic archive. Magazine articles are sold for $2.95 (£2), while a dissertation (in electronic form) costs around $50 (£33). The site sells books too, selected by a string of carefully chosen bookshops and by a weighty editorial team which includes such luminaries as Harold Bloom and the playwright Wendy Wasserman.
But only a week into its launch the $120m (£80m) company found itself embroiled in a bitter dispute. And for once, Brill found himself up against thousands of disgruntled freelance writers rather than the media higher-ups that he usually tackles in his magazine Brill's Content.
The writers are complaining that their work is being sold on his new site without their prior consent. What rubs salt in the wound is that Brill has always sold himself as a guardian of the little fella. And besides, all he had to do was ask.
Brill launched Brill's Content in 1998 and it rapidly gathered a reputation for being a brash magazine that prided itself on whistle-blowing its way through the US media. Brill had cut his teeth 20 years earlier as founder of the first court TV service in the US, before moving on to found the magazines American Lawyer and Consumer Reports.
So when he announced, back in February, that he was to form a partnership with some of the biggest names in the US media, many pundits reacted with surprise and even scorn. How could a media watchdog be of any use if it was in the lap of the corporations it was set to guard against?
Brill's partners include NBC, CBS (who gained 35% equity in Contentville in return for $40m (£26m) worth of advertising and promotions over a three-year period) and Ebsco, a company which provides magazine subscription services and databases of archive content. In other words, the very companies that Brill's Content is famous for monitoring. It was as if Private Eye had cut a deal with Rupert Murdoch and begun selling edited highlights of Hansard at a couple of pounds a throw.
As Matt Welch of the Online Journalism Review points out: "He [Brill] will benefit materially from every positive book or magazine review he publishes, and his right to cover one of the most important media issues of the day... is hopelessly compromised."
Immediately, Brill announced that he was stepping down as as editor-in-chief of the magazine, turning those duties over to David Kuhn, who had joined the company last autumn from Talk magazine. Kuhn will edit both sites and Brill will remain as chairman and CEO of Brill Media Holdings - the company which oversees Brill's Content and Contentville. But he has insisted he will keep the two entities separate.
Writing in Media Life magazine, Jeff Bercovici noted: "It's almost as though, by appointing a single editor-in-chief for both ventures and announcing plans to share staffs and stories, he's intentionally stirring up controversy."
But the trouble really started in the week after the launch. A number of online writing lists began to receive complaints from disgruntled freelancers claiming that they had found their articles available on Contentville. One writer, Catherine Dold, discovered that an article she had written in 1993 was for sale on the site. She believes that she retains copyright and has said that she was never contacted by Contentville or the article's original publishers.
Dold immediately posted a warning on the online-writers list at content-exchange.com. She said: "Big surprise. Several articles I wrote for Discover are being offered for sale on Contentville. I hold the copyright to these, no question... I suggest everyone do a search on your name at this site."
She quickly found out she was not alone. Freelance writers across the US began complaining to the National Writers Union (NWU) that their work was available on the website without prior permission being granted. The authors claim that they still own the copyright to the material and have contracts to prove it. What's more, a number of the writers claim to have contacted the website and informed them of the infringement. None has received an initial reply and none of the work has been removed.
The NWU immediately posted an email alert, warning its members that: "There could literally be thousands whose work is being used illegally" on Brill's new site.
Then, a letter addressed to Steve Brill, by NWU president Jonathan Tasini, claimed that several of its members who retain copyright reported to Contentville that their work was being used without permission.
Contentville responded by stating that more than a million articles are offered on its site legitimately, under a contract with the magazine archive company Ebsco.
Contentville's website states that: "Except for materials in the public domain, all of the content of Contentville.com is the property of Contentville.com or its content suppliers and is protected by copyright laws..." The site also claims that it "will block access to and/or remove any material that it believes in good faith to be copyrighted".
Obviously embarrassed by the criticism, Brill responded on the Poynter Institute's media news website (www.poynter.org/medianews/letters.htm) claiming that his company had bought the articles in good faith and was "keeping exact records of each article that we sell so that we can pay whoever the appropriate copyright owner is".
He added: "I don't think we should be cast as the bad guy here for trying to create a market for this stuff - and for getting that process started by going to those who are promising that they own it."
But the mess was not confined to small-time freelances either, it was reported last week that Associated Press is investigating after one of its business writers found AP stories in the Contentville archives. The New York newspaper the Village Voice has also complained that its own archive material is being sold on the site.
Some analysts have suggested that what Brill wants to do is ditch Brill's Content, a magazine that has never made a profit, and concentrate on the e-publishers. Both Brill and Kuhn have denied this. But the kind of publicity generated by the ugly mess over writers' copyright will hardly inspire confidence in an ailing magazine.
The NWU is confident that the row can be resolved and cites a similar recent dispute with another pay-to-download site, www.mercurycenter.com. Also, the union offers a similar service of its own - the Publication Rights Clearing House - which it is urging sites like Contentville to adopt.
But David Wallis, a New York-based writer who is planning to launch an elite freelancers' agency, told the Village Voice that he sees Brill's attempt at reconciliation with the NWU as a "dodge," and a reaction to the "terrible publicity and backlash" of last week. Wallis says: "As a media watchdog, Steve Brill has rabies."
It is perhaps worth remembering what Brill's Content was meant to be about. In what amounts to a mission statement on the original Brill's Content website, Brill wrote: "It's time to hold journalists accountable. It's time we embarrass them into doing their jobs the way they're supposed to - with integrity, honesty, fairness and accuracy." Catherine Dold and the freelancers on the online discussion list might well be musing on those words and wondering, while they patiently wait for their cheques to arrive, just what happened to Steve Brill?
