Yet Another Plan To Change Copyright Law To Protect Newspapers
from the please,-someone,-think-this-through dept
Last week, we wrote about Judge Posner's troubling idea that copyright law should be changed to protect newspapers, and this week, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer is backing the same basic idea as proposed by two brothers, David and Daniel Marburger. One is a First Amendment lawyer and the other an economist -- and I'm stunned that both would get things so backwards. Their specific proposal is that:- Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports.
- Injunctions would bar aggregators' profiting from newspapers' content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.
No. That's not the complaint at all. The problem is much more basic than that. It's that newspapers (and the Marburgers, apparently) are confused about how people communicate and what business they're in. They think -- incorrectly -- that newspapers are in the business of delivering the news. But that's just a small part of it. They're really in the business of building a community of folks, who they then sell to advertisers. As such, they need to be doing two things, both of which this plan makes harder:
- They need to provide more value to their community, so they stick around
- They need to attract more people to their community
Of course, in the meantime, Jay Rosen points us to Josh Young's analysis of what would almost certainly happen if newspapers could block others from linking to them. It's essentially what we've suggested in the past: if you give short-sighted and clueless newspapers the tools to block others from sending them traffic, that just opens wide the market for their smarter competitors to gladly accept all that traffic. Hell, it appears that Reuters recognizes the future. The folks there must be salivating over the idea that others would lock up their content and leave the playing field wide open to Reuters to scoop up all that traffic.
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Filed Under: copyright, daniel marburger, david marburger, first amendment, journalism, newspapers, restriction
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And this line:
"Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports."
reimburse? Since Google sends the person to their site, how is there any loss of revenue that needs to be reimbursed? And the sad part is that the media laps all this stuff up because they're incapable of looking at themselves with the same investigative eye that they seem to value so much.
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Re:
If Google aggregates the content and sends the user directly to the news page, google got 3 - 5 page views and the news site got 1.
So if a Google refered surfer visits less pages than a general public or front page visitor, then there is a loss of page views due to aggregation.
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You can't look at Grandma's surf habits and assume they apply to most of the rest of the population...she's gonna die in about 5 years...you have to look at the younger population's habits...and they start from the social networking sites and branch out from there, or from igoogle or something else that aggregates.
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Can someone do a better job at summarizing, writing, and still be sued by hundreds of copyright owners, not for the fact that it is better (Which is probably why they got sued in the first place), but for pure ego, and the fact that they are able to create a new emotion or further a community?
Can someone create something you couldn't ever do because you live within the unfortunate realm of copyright?
The Latchkey kid will figure it out.
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Let them try this
If you heard about a story and had to start out by going to the home page then hunting for the story would you bother?
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Re: Let them try this
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Re: Let them try this
This really astounds me. Let me clear something up for you. It is ridiculously easy for any site to control access to any page through any number of criteria. This kind of thing is built into any modern web server. The argument of "We don't want people to link directly to our pages" holds no water at all, because they have complete control over that. What they want is to be paid by people sending them traffic, but that can't say that as we'd all see just how ridiculous it is.
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