Since 1968, the Vanderbilt Television Archive, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has been taping the news. By now it holds some 28,000 videotapes, representing more than 22,000 evening news broadcasts from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, along with 8,000 hours of special broadcasts, including presidential debates, speeches, inaugurations, and press conferences. For historians, researchers, and writers it is a treasure trove.

Late this spring, thanks to a $ 95,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, it will be a more accessible treasure trove, with item-by-item descriptions of each news broadcast available on-line via The Internet. But now that the archive is about to increase its visibility, certain broadcast television executives, particularly at CBS, seem to wish it would disappear.

Archive users can already order videotapes of news stories in several ways B by date, by topic, by person or place, by reporter's name, or even by the commercials that ran during a broadcast. The tapes are loaned, not sold. For a fee, the archive will compile tapes of the selected segments and mail them off. For $ 330 per year, about 100 archive subscribers, mostly libraries, receive a monthly publication and an annual two-volume index that provides a detailed breakdown of the news broadcasts.

CBS was never happy with this arrangement (see "Access to Television's Past," CJR, November/December 1976). In 1976 the network filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Vanderbilt University, only to drop it in 1978 after Congress passed a new copyright law that included a fair-use clause, which allowed noncommercial duplication of the news.

Now that the archive is about to gain a wider audience, CBS is complaining again. Part of the argument is about money, says Don DeCesare, vice-president of operations at CBS News, but the real issue is copyright. "There is only one side to the story: the material recorded is ours. It always has been and always will be," he says. "If we put something on the air we stand behind it. But if someone else is duplicating it, editing it, and sending it out, we've been removed from that process."

ABC isn't happy with the on-line arrangement either. Putting the archive's material on The Internet, says Joel Kanoff, manager of the ABC Film/Videotape Library and Archive, "means this material will be more accessible. It's material that we feel we are sole copyright owners of. It's our domain, not theirs." NBC refused to comment.

Whether any of the networks, including CBS, are prepared to act on their complaints is unclear. In any event, DeCesare's recent visit to Nashville to talk with archive officials did not seem to mollify him. "I am sympathetic to the problem the archive faces, but not to the extent that I will let them undermine our copyright," he says.

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