WASHINGTON AP – As a federal judge, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor dealt with two important media issues – copyrights and access – and was reversed by higher courts when she ruled that freelance writers need not be compensated for online use of their published work, documents released Thursday show.

As a federal trial judge, Sotomayor ruled in 1997 that newspaper publishers were not violating copyrights by putting their freelancers’ work into electronic databases.