Perhaps worth noting, there was a SCOTUS decision in the early 2000s (New York Times Co. v. Tasini) that held that freelance journalists whose contracts did not specifically include an electronic distribution clause were entitled to damages when those articles were subsequently released on the web and to electronic news services like Lexis/Nexis.

Big publications like the NYT came to settlements that allowed them to pay to redistribute the older articles (by paying the original authors), but smaller publications may not have such a settlement structure in place and may not be allowed to redistribute the original articles without additional permissions.

FYI, I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM version that came out in 2001… only to immediately disappear off the market for this very reason!