What A Shame: Legacy Newspapers Want To Take Away Free Speech On The Internet

from the tarnished-reputation dept

This one is just shameful. The News Media Alliance (the organization formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America) represents a bunch of old school newspapers. Like other legacy companies which failed to adapt to the internet, it's now advocating for the removal of Section 230 protections from internet services.

According to a written testimony provided to Axios, NMA will tell parties on Wednesday at the Justice Department's upcoming workshop on Section 230 that policymakers should limit the safe harbor exemption within the law that protects tech platforms from being sued for the content that other people post on its site.

What's most shameful about this is that newspapers have a long history of being the most prominent free speech supporters. And the whole point of Section 230 is that it helps enable more free speech online. Removing 230 will inevitably lead to greater censorship and difficulty in enabling the public to speak out.

While you can see -- cynically -- why this might appeal to legacy newspapers that have lost their position as the gatekeepers for what public speech is allowed to reach the wider world, it really casts a huge shadow on the legacy of those newspapers as free speech supporters. This is little more than a cynical ploy by angry newspapers to try to hobble internet platforms that enable speech that have taken away some of the monopolistic gatekeeper control those newspapers had. It's a sad coda to decades of free speech support.

Filed Under: cda 230, free speech, newspapers, section 230
Companies: news media alliance

NY Times Publishes Laughable Propaganda To Argue Google Owes Newspapers Like Itself Free Money

from the all-the-propaganda-that-fits-to-pad-our-bottom-line dept

Earlier this week, I posted about a silly new organization that claims it's going to "save journalism" mainly by whining about how evil Google and Facebook are. As I noted in that piece, even if you believe Google and Facebook are evil, it's not clear how whining about them being evil provides any new journalists jobs. But the news industry as a whole has been on this weird "blame someone else" kick for way too long. The "News Media Alliance" (formerly the Newspaper Association of America) has been on a weird anti-tech protectionist kick for years now, and on Monday published a "study" claiming that Google made $4.7 billion from news -- a number that was then trumpeted loudly by the NY Times, which just happens to be one of the larger members of the News Media Alliance.

There's just one tiny problem. The "study" is no study at all and basically everyone in the media business is laughing at the NY Times for publishing such a ridiculously bogus study without highlighting how bogus it was. The $4.7 billion is not based on any careful research. It's based on one off-hand comment from over a decade ago by an exec who hasn't been at Google in years, and then extrapolated forward. Really.

That study relies on a public comment then–Google executive Marissa Mayer made at a media event in 2008, when she estimated that Google News brought in $100 million in revenue. The NMA report calculates what the same proportion of the company’s revenue would be today, then further inflates this figure based on the fact that news consumption via Google’s main search is 6 times larger than via Google News (according to the NMA’s estimate of referral traffic to newspaper websites).

This is not what any sensible person would call a "sound" methodology. Oh, and I almost forgot the kicker:

...the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative

The NY Times also kinda skimmed over the purposeful timing of this study's release. The News Media Alliance has been pushing for sometime for a special antitrust exemption to allow big news orgs to collude to try to force more money out of Google and Facebook, and the study was released just a day before a Congressional hearing on the topic. Most normal reporters would recognize that, maybe (just maybe) there was an ulterior motive in releasing this "report" with such a flimsy statistic. But the Times reported it as if it was fact.

There may be plenty of reasons to distrust Google and Facebook and their role regarding journalism, but this report is not any of that. Google doesn't even put ads on most of Google News, but instead pushes visitors off to the websites of news orgs. If those news orgs are failing to monetize that traffic, it seems pretty ridiculous to blame google for that and demand more money via collusive efforts.

As Jeff Jarvis notes in his own response to the NYT's piece, if the publishers want to point the blame finger, they might want to start by turning it back on themselves:

The problem has long been that publishers aren’t competent at exploiting the full value of these clicks by creating meaningful and valuable ongoing relationships with the people sent their way. So what does Google do? It tries to help publishers by, for example, starting a subscription service that drives more readers to easily subscribe — and join and contribute — to news sites directly from Google pages. The NMA study cites that subscription service as an example of Google emphasizing news and by implication exploiting publishers. It is the opposite. Google started the subscription service because publishers begged for it — I was in the room when they did — and Google listened. The same goes for most every product change the study lists in which Google emphasizes news more. That helps publishers. The study then uses ridiculously limited data (including, crucially, an offhand and often disputed remark 10 years ago by a then-exec at Google about the conceptual value of news) to make leaps over logic to argue that news is important on its services and thus Google owes news publishers a cut of its revenue (which Google gains by offering publishers’ former customers, advertisers, a better deal; it’s called competition). By this logic, Instagram should be buying cat food for every kitty in the land and Reddit owes a fortune to conspiracy theorists.

The real problem here is news publishers’ dogged refusal to understand how the internet has changed their world, throwing the paradigm they understood into the grinder.

Yes, the world has changed. But the NMA seems to think that the government should now just force the internet companies to hand over money after their own members spent years twiddling their thumbs and squandering any attempt to build up loyal followings and sustainable business models. It's not easy to keep a media business sustainable these days, but so much of it has to do with those companies refusing to recognize how the internet was changing the business, and how to take advantage of those changes.

Filed Under: collusion, internet, news, newspapers
Companies: google, news media alliance, ny times

US Newspapers Now Salivating Over Bringing A Google Snippet Tax Stateside

from the it's-spreading... dept

As the EU is still trying to figure out what it's going to do about the highly contested EU Copyright Directive, it appears that at least one of the controversial parts, the ridiculous Article 11 link tax, is spreading to the US. David Chavern, the CEO of the News Media Alliance (a trade group representing legacy news publishers), is agitating in the NY Times for a US version of Article 11. The article if is so chock full of "wrong" that it's embarrassing. Let's dig in.

Facebook and Google have been brutal to the news business.

Citation needed. Seriously. Nothing in this piece explains how this is true. I know that lots of journalists claim it to be true, but they are lacking in evidence. The truth is Facebook and Google have been very good for some news operations, very bad for others, and all over the spectrum for others. It kinda depends on the news organization and the choices of those news organizations specifically. In other words: it's the news organizations' fault if they're suddenly having trouble because their traffic has dried up.

But this primarily reflects a failure of imagination. The tech giants are the world’s best distribution platforms and could be an answer for journalism instead of a grave threat.

Again, for many news organizations, these platforms are an answer: an answer that drives traffic.

As readers have shifted to digital sources, the two companies have taken a large majority of online advertising revenue.

Note the verb choice: "taken." As if it was snatched away from the rightful owners: the legacy news business who did fuck all to adapt to the internet. No, the large majority of online advertising went to those platforms because those platforms provided a better result for advertisers. We can discuss whether or not that's a good thing, and whether or not advertisers are silly to focus on those platforms (indeed, I'd argue, they are!). But to blame Facebook and Google for making advertisers happier seems weird.

More important, the platforms now act as “regulators” of the news business — determining what information gets delivered to whom, and when. With the flick of an algorithmic finger, those two companies decide what news you see and whether a publisher lives or dies.

They only do that if the news publications focused solely on chasing traffic, rather than building up loyal audiences who come directly to their sites. Nothing Google or Facebook do really has that much of an impact on our traffic. Because we don't rely on them for traffic. They send us some -- which is great -- but our strategy has always focused on loyal readers, not drive by traffic. So, no, Techdirt readers don't rely on those platforms to get our content. Nor should they.

If your entire business strategy is based on some third party you can't control, it seems a little, well, dubious, for you to whine that they don't act the way you want them to.

The impact on journalism has been clear. Just within the past week, we have seen over 1,000 planned layoffs at Gannett, BuzzFeed and HuffPost, and no one thinks we are anywhere near the end.

This is also misleading. While, yes, there were some high profile layoffs that included a bunch of journalists -- and that sucks -- the 1,000 number is greatly exaggerated. As Peter Sterne pointed out, the vast majority of that 1,000 number (~800) came from "Oath" the Verizon-owned Frankenstein's monster made up of various properties from HuffPost to Yahoo to AOL -- and the majority of them were not journalists. So, yes, it's still bad to see these layoffs. But using this 1,000 number to imply that that many journalists lost their job is highly misleading, and pretty shameful for a guy who represents news publishers.

We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism.

Free is not the fucking business model. Free has never been a business model. However, free can very often be a key part of a very compelling business model.

Facebook and Google flatly refuse to pay for news even though they license many other types of content. Both companies have deals to pay music publishers when copyrighted songs play on their platforms. And the companies also aggressively bid to stream live sports and entertainment content to run on Facebook Watch and YouTube. These deals are varied and often secret, but none of them are based on “free.”

And this may be the dumbest thing that Chavern has written in this entire article full of bad ideas. Google and Facebook pay licenses for that other content because they host that content full on their sites. They don't pay for news because they're not hosting the news, but rather sending traffic to those news sites. For free.

Why are the platforms so unwilling to pay news publishers for access to the quality journalism that users need and value?

Again, because you're comparing apples to oranges. This is comparing totally different situations in a way that makes no sense.

There’s no reason those who produce the news shouldn’t enjoy the same intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers (regulators in Europe are looking at replicating some of these safeguards for journalism).

These are not "the same intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers." News already has the same "intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers." It's called copyright and it applies to news as well as songs. The issue is that what's happening here is entirely different. Google and Facebook pay for hosting music. They're not hosting news (other than in very minor ways where news orgs choose to host on their platforms for specific purposes). Instead, Google and Facebook are sending people off to the news sites themselves, which should be a better deal, because then you have those people on your own damn site where you can offer all sorts of other things -- some of which might even make the publishers some money. Or, build a loyal fan base who won't need to go through those dastardly platforms in the future.

And, yes, it's blatantly misleading to claim that the EU's ridiculous Article 11 is the EU "replicating some of these safeguards for journalism." Hell, this is close to journalistic malpractice from a guy who pretends to represent journalism. Remember, we already know what happens with an Article 11 type setup: it didn't magically lead to the big platforms paying news publishers, and it actually did significant harm to news publishers, in particular the smaller ones.

The tech giants are also run as “walled gardens” that minimize brands and separate publishers from their readers — even while hoarding information about those same readers.

I don't think he knows what a "walled garden" means. And, again, these services work by sending readers to the news publication sites themselves. That's not "separating publishers from readers" unless the publishers are so clueless they do nothing to build a loyal community.

Imagine trying to build a trusted relationship with an audience when you can’t even know who they are.

That's how every community works. You don't know who they are at first. You build up trust and maybe they tell you. But you need to work on building a direct relationship yourself. You don't sit there and just wait for the audience to magically find you and then blame Google when they don't.

Publishers need new economic terms that include more revenue and more information about our readers.

So, uh, build the new revenue models that involve building up a loyal community who chooses to share info and you get that. And Google and Facebook don't.

Facebook and Google also need to be willing to acknowledge investments in quality journalism through their algorithms. They are constantly on the defensive about spreading false and misleading “news” that hurts people. They could start to address the problem by simply recognizing that The Miami Herald is a much better news source than Russian bots or Macedonian teenagers — and highlighting original, quality content accordingly.

Um, both Facebook and (especially) Google already do that. How does he not know this. Indeed, the entire point of Google is to promote the more trustworthy content. It fails sometimes, but this paragraph misleadingly suggests that Google treats Macedonian teens at the same level as it treats the Miami Herald and that's laughably wrong. You can't make good policy decisions if you simply are spouting off nonsense.

Recognizing and promoting publishers that have consistently delivered quality news content can’t be that difficult for sophisticated tech companies. And there are a range of qualified independent ratings organizations, such as NewsGuard, that could help them separate the wheat from the chaff.

Again, that's exactly what Google already does.

Whether they like to admit it or not, Facebook and Google are at real risk when it comes to the news business. Under the adage “You break it, you buy it,” the platforms now own what happens when quality journalism goes away.

Facebook and Google didn't break news. Newspapers failed to adapt and now they're whining about it.

A true leader for the news publishers wouldn't be begging platforms like Google and Facebook for money like that. He'd be helping those platforms adapt and build more loyal audiences, and experiment with more sophisticated business models. And, really, the most incredible part of this strategy from Chavern and the News Media Alliance is that it would only serve to do one thing: making those news publishers more reliant on Google and Facebook, giving them even more power.

News organizations deserve better than to have a trade organization spewing such utter nonsense.

Filed Under: article 11, david chavern, google news, google tax, journalism, news, newspapers, platforms
Companies: facebook, google, news media alliance

News Publishers Ask For Monopoly Powers To Fight Back Against Google/Facebook Monopoly

from the if-you-can't-beat-them,-join-them-in-antitrust-violations dept

Cool. Cool. More two wrongs make a right legislation is being routed through the federal government. The first wrong? Facebook and Google have "too much" power, apparently, and they're strangling the life out of news agencies. Allegedly. This would seem to raise antitrust issues, if they're actually big enough to throttle newspapers and other publishers into submission. That's a big if, but why wait until the facts are in to decide? How do you fight a supposed monopoly? By allowing more monopoly, apparently.

Representative David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island) plans to introduce a bill that would exempt publishers from antitrust enforcement so they can negotiate collectively over terms for distributing their content. Cicilline says the bill is designed to level the playing field between publishers and the tech giants, not dictate the outcome. Without an exemption, collective action by publishers could run afoul of antitrust laws around colluding over price or refusal to deal with competitors.

Oddly enough, several media companies are onboard with this hot monopoly-on-monopoly action. The News Media Alliance -- representing 2,000 newspapers across the US and Canada -- thinks it doesn't have enough leverage to negotiate with social media companies. So, it wants to be allowed to break the law to make things more fair. It seems that if the problem is a social media/search engine monopoly, then legislators might want to have a word with the monopolists before allowing another set of media companies to collude to make the internet a shitty place to find news.

To make this plea for government-blessed collusion, the head of the NMA, David Chavern, has decided to belittle the internet and the people who use it.

[C]havern believes the news business warrants intervention because of its role in a healthy democracy. “The republic is not going to suffer terribly if we have bad cat video or even bad movies or bad TV. The republic will suffer if we have bad journalism,” he says, pointing to data from Pew that shows newspaper advertising fell by $4 billion from 2014 to 2016, even though web traffic for the top U.S. newspapers grew 42 percent during the same time period.

This is some prime elitist claptrap. The internet can be used for more than one thing. People who watch cat videos also read local reporting. People who enjoy bad TV also enjoy in-depth journalism. None of this is mutually exclusive and none of this has anything to do with Google or Facebook or media companies seeking permission to get the band back together and engage in monopolistic behavior. If you're so dead set on "saving the republic," why is your first move to punch holes in antitrust laws? Are you that obtuse? Do you think that hole won't be made wider by competitors for consumers' attention, resulting in even less traffic and ad revenue for news publishers?

While I understand the desire to "level" the playing field, the mechanism is completely wrong. Many, many publishers have complained about Facebook and Google destroying them but none have ever put their remaining money where their mouth is and walked away from whatever these tech companies have offered. Maybe they feel a bad deal is better than no deal at all. Or maybe they actually recognize these companies drive traffic to their sites -- traffic they wouldn't have otherwise.

At the bottom of this is a demand for money. Publishers want Google and Facebook to pay (more) for sending them traffic. Since they can't produce enough leverage to sell this worthless bill of goods, they want the government to give them a pass on antitrust charges until they get the payout they want. This won't work out the way they want it to and it will create a hole in antitrust laws others will exploit, all in the name of "fairness."

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, david cicilline, internet platforms, journalism, monopolies, news
Companies: facebook, google, news media alliance

All Out Of Ideas, Legacy News Providers Ask US Gov't For The Right To Collude Against Google & Facebook

from the failure-to-adapt dept

About a month ago, Buzzfeed's founder and CEO, Jonah Peretti summed up my feelings about watching old news media organizations running around everywhere blaming Google and Facebook for their own failure to innovate:

“A lot of the traditional media players are opportunistically attacking Facebook and Google because Facebook and Google have figured out a better model for delivering information and entertaining people which is real-time, personalised, shareable and global – all these things that you can't do in broadcast and print,” he says.

“These traditional media companies have had decades of massive cashflow and they decided to stockpile that instead of investing in digital. They just kept managing earnings on their traditional businesses even though we have known for 20-plus years that the internet was going to be a big thing and now all these things have unfolded, with some surprises but in a way that was not that hard to predict. Now we are at the point where Facebook’s and Google's revenues are starting to be a substantial portion of the pie, they are attacking them, saying it is unfair.

“The truth is that Facebook and Google have always taken a long term perspective – so has Netflix, so has Amazon – that the internet would win out in the end. A lot of the big media companies always took a quarter-to-quarter perspective, a maximise earnings perspective, and that has resulted in them being in a tough position and so they attack Facebook and Google because of it.”

This is, more or less, what we've been arguing for nearly two decades. There are a ton of opportunities for these companies if they actually embraced digital -- but they did so in drips and drabs and often stupidly chasing fads, rather than actually figuring out how to deliver content that people actually wanted in a way they wanted it. So, for the past few years, they've focused on whining about how it's so gosh darn unfair that the companies who did figure it out -- Google and Facebook -- are now making lots of money.

And... now those legacy firms are seeking the nuclear option. The News Media Alliance -- formerly the Newspaper Association of America -- has spent the last few years pushing bad idea after bad idea to try to "save" the news organizations that failed to actually innovate (for example: asking Trump to whittle away fair use). We mocked the fair use proposal as complete nonsense, but in order to make it happen, the News Media Alliance is... asking the government for a special exception to antitrust law to allow its members to collude against Google and Facebook... and to generally make the internet less interesting and more expensive.

Today, the News Media Alliance – representing almost 2,000 news organizations – called on Congress to allow publishers to negotiate collectively with dominant online platforms. The objective is to permit publishers to have concrete discussions with the two dominant distributors of online news content, Google and Facebook, on business model solutions to secure the long-term availability of local journalism produced by America’s newsrooms.

Supposedly there are three goals here: to get greater copyright control over news and to create a snippet tax, to force Google and Facebook to work with news organizations on some sort of subscription program, and to get "a fair share" of revenue and user data. None of these make much sense. As Matt Schruers at the Disruptive Competition Project points out, all three of these goals have issues:

Let’s consider those three objectives: IP protection, subscriptions, and a “fair share” of revenue and data. First, news publishers do not need an antitrust exemption to lobby for more IP protection; federal law already allows it. (As I’ve noted before, News Corp. is already quite fond of doing so.)

Second, Google and Facebook are already pursuing new strategies for supporting subscriptions. The NMA proposal, however, suggests a collective turn to subscription models, removing consumers’ ability to choose among products with different business models, including ad-supported ones. Individual newspapers should have the freedom to experiment, pursuing the model best suited to their business. Consumers are best served when they can choose between competing models.

Third, Chavern wants a “fair share of revenue and data.” In pursuit of this, the NMA would make an end-run around copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which permits the indexing of content, so as to force digital services to pay for the privilege of sending traffic to their sites. As I discuss below, news publishers have tried this in Europe. It hasn’t gone well.

There are lots of other problems here as well. As Mathew Ingram pointed out, there's tremendous hubris in the NMA members thinking that they're the only ones producing quality journalism:

This sense of entitlement is at the core of what the NMA is proposing. In effect, it is suggesting that mainstream newspaper companies are the only entities capable of producing quality journalism, and therefore they deserve a get-out-of-jail-free card so they can engage in what amounts to collusion. And they are hoping Congress will see Google and Facebook as the enemy.

Here’s a thought: What if these newspaper companies had spent a little more time trying to compete over the past decade or so, instead of relying on their historic market control to keep their profits rolling in? What if more had tried to improve their websites and their mobile versions, so that users wouldn’t install ad blockers, or turn to other solutions like Facebook Instant Articles?

Every single competitive threat the newspaper industry has faced, from Craigslist to Facebook, has been visible long before it decimated the industry’s profits, and most of the newspapers in the NMA did little or nothing to deal with them until it was too late.

Indeed, some more local news organizations are already pushing back against the NMA's plans. The Local Media Consortium, which admits some overlap with NMA members, points out that this whole thing seems like the wrong approach:

First, Chavern’s position ignores the LMC’s work during the last four years forging partnerships essential to us as providers of quality local content and local business solutions. Those partnerships align the news industry – print, broadcast and ultimately digital – with tech companies in a symbiotic relationship. The LMC has provided revenue opportunities for all levels of local media – and we’ve done that while leveraging our scale to garner both the attention and respect of the tech platforms. We have built partnerships based on shared value, not entitlement.

Second, I am concerned about the mixed messages the NMA’s stance is creating within the industry and our own LMC membership. The NMA board includes several members of the LMC, and these board members may not be fully aware of our relationship with tech companies. Chavern’s op-ed suggests a lack of knowledge of the tens of millions of dollars our partnership with Google has netted the industry, or the inroads we have made influencing innovation with Google, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo

That is, the LMC is looking at new tech and innovation as an opportunity. The NMA, on the other hand, seems to be looking at it as the enemy. This is a fairly typical response for legacy industries who failed to adapt, then flail about wildly against those who succeeded, but it's never good for consumers (there's a reason we don't allow collusion to happen after all...).

Rafat Ali probably summed all of this up best:

Look, I get it. Google and Facebook are big and successful and making lots of money. And because these news organizations failed to do much to adapt (or, at best, made superficial embraces of digital), they're pissed and they blame Google and Facebook for their own failures (not unlike the recording and film industries). But that misses the point. There's a reason why this happened, and we shouldn't have the US government reward those who didn't innovate by taxing those who did. The end result would be bad for the public. It would be bad for innovation.

And, sure, I'm saying this as a news publication that is concerned about Google and Facebook's power in the market -- but it's on me to figure out how to adapt and leverage the benefits that platforms like that (and others) bring. Not to go running to the government seeking to collude with others and to cement weak business models in place. Frankly, for companies seeking to blame others rather than their own failures, it's probably best that they go out of business sooner, rather than later. Clear the field for others who are willing to innovate and embrace technology, rather than whine about it.

Filed Under: antitrust, collusion, competition, innovation, news, newspapers
Companies: facebook, google, news media alliance, newspaper association of america, nma

Short Sighted Newspaper Association Asks Trump To Whittle Down Fair Use, Because It Hates Google

from the this-is-really-dumb dept

Sometimes you wonder just how ridiculous some legacy industries can be. The latest is the News Media Alliance, which is apparently the new name of what was the Newspaper Association of America. Just a few months ago, we were mocking that organization's ridiculous proposal that readers of newspaper websites should be forced to allow invasive ad trackers, and that adblockers shouldn't be allowed. And believe it or not, now the group has even worse suggestions. It has sent a "white paper" to Donald Trump with the types of things it's looking for from a Trump administration. The white paper is really just a 3 page memo dressed up slightly with the term "white paper" at the top -- as opposed to a carefully developed plan.

But the really ridiculous bit is that these media publications -- who regularly rely on fair use, are asking Trump to dump fair use:

Strong copyright protection is needed. Newspaper content makes up approximately two-thirds of the content on news aggregation platforms such as Google News, but many of these relatively new players in the digital ecosystem build audiences and generate revenue from newspaper content with little if any revenue coming back to those who have invested in creating the original content. Today, the news media industry invests roughly $5 billion each year in long-form investigative journalism. Our nation’s copyright laws must be structured and implemented in a way that allows for a return on this massive investment. Today, outdated interpretations of copyright laws mean that the industry is currently forced to give away much of its product for free. The government needs to put in place copyright protections that allow news organizations and other content creators to fairly benefit from their critical efforts and investments.

“Fair use” should be reoriented toward its original meaning. Under current copyright law, a person that does not own a copyright may still use a copyrighted work if it is consistent with the “fair use” factors, which assess: (1) the purpose and character of the use, (2) the nature of the copyrighted work, (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and (4) the effect upon the potential market. The courts, unfortunately, have dramatically weakened this test by finding a fair use any time a new use could be seen as “transformative.” This test has undermined the integrity of the long-established fair use factors. As part of any Copyright Act rewrite, we support refocusing the fair-use test on its original purpose to prevent courts from undermining the Constitution’s encouragement of compensation to entities that generate creativity and productivity.

This is dumb on so many levels. First, the claim that newspapers don't get any revenue from the likes of Google is ridiculous, when you consider how much they whine and freak out if Google removes them from search. They get revenue in the form of traffic from aggregators. If they're bad at monetizing it, that's one thing, but that's not the aggregators' fault.

Second, copyright laws should never be designed with the idea of making sure it enables recouping an investment. Because copyright is not the business model. Copyright is a mechanism that creates a business model, and that business model may or may not be successful. Just saying you invest $5 billion and therefore copyright needs to cover that nut makes no sense. I could just as easily claim that I'm going to invest $5 billion in improving Techdirt -- and therefore Trump needs to make sure that there's a business model to allow me to recoup that? No, that's crazy. It's not the government's job to make sure your own bad business decisions still pay off.

Third: the media attacking fair use is insane. Newspapers regularly rely on fair use in their reporting, and the group is shooting itself in the foot in asking Trump to take away that tool. This is especially true given that Trump himself has insisted he wants to "open up our libel laws" with the specific aim of harming newspapers. Remember, this is the context in which he said he was going to open up such laws:

If I become President, oh, are they going to have problems. They're going to have such problems.

... One of the things I'm going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we're certainly leading. I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We're going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected.

.... So we're going to open up those libel laws, folks, and we're going to have people sue you like you've never got sued before...

While he was specifically talking about libel laws, as we've seen over and over again, copyright is an amazing tool for censorship as well. In fact, the Supreme Court itself has noted that fair use is the necessary "safety valve" on copyright's free speech stifling powers. So for newspapers to basically gift wrap to Trump a way in which he can pull back a tool that protects their free speech -- just as he's been promising to attack their free speech -- is ludicrous.

About the only saving grace in all of this is that Trump acts as if he hates the big newspapers so much, that perhaps he'll have no desire to make them happy by following through on this idiotic suggestion.

In the meantime, if you work for a news organization that is a member of the News Media Alliance, maybe ask them why they're undermining a core principle of free speech in asking for fair use to be limited?

Filed Under: aggregation, business models, copyright, donald trump, fair use, free speech, news, newspapers
Companies: google, news media alliance, newspaper association of america