The Guardian Makes It Super Simple For Blogs To Repost Its Content

from the contrarian-journalism dept

We've pointed out a few times that The Guardian newspaper in the UK is not just a believer in the value of keeping its content free online, but is also doing a lot of very interesting experiments. As we hear daily about newspapers and organizations like the Associated Press threatening to sue blogs that repost some of their content (even for commentary purposes), The Guardian is going in the completely opposite direction. As part of its Open Platform program, it has created a tool that lets any Wordpress-based blog repost any Guardian article for free. Yes, this is the complete opposite of what most publications are doing. Rather than whining about "freeloaders" and "copycats" and "aggregators," The Guardian has decided to embrace them and take advantage of the situation.

The only conditions are that you have to republish the full article in the exact format provided (including "text, links and images"). That's because The Guardian is also embedding ads with those syndicated stories. Assuming the ads are not particularly intrusive or annoying, then I would imagine that many blogs find this to be a perfectly reasonable deal. And, yes, if you were wondering, the site doing the syndication is free to include their own ads elsewhere on the page. However, according to The Guardian's explanation of this offering, you can add your own commentary -- it just needs to go above The Guardian's content.

Basically, the Guardian seems to be realizing what so many other newspapers have failed to grasp: that people republishing your stuff are helping to promote your work and spread your work in useful ways. Rather than breaking out the lawyers and the nastygrams, why not figure out a way to make everyone better off?

Filed Under: embedding, journalism, syndication
Companies: the guardian

TV Broadcasters Suing Songwriters' Org SESAC Over Pricing Power

from the tug-o'-war dept

Missed this one when it first came out, but Copycense points us to the news that TV broadcasters have sued SESAC, one of the collections agencies for songwriters and composers (the smallest, after ASCAP and BMI), claiming that SESAC is violating antitrust laws in how it prices music used in television shows -- especially for syndicated shows. The details are really quite fascinating. Local stations quite often run syndicated shows (such as sitcom reruns). When they buy the rights to run those syndicated shows, the package includes all of the related copyrights except for performance rights for any of the music included. Those have to be purchased separately by the broadcasters themselves. Now, for SESAC, representing the songwriters, this presents a golden opportunity. It's the only thing standing between the broadcaster and being able to show the syndicated shows -- and thus, it can ask for extremely high prices, or -- more commonly -- pressure the broadcasters into a high-priced "blanket license." Since the broadcasters can't change out the music (it's in the shows already), they generally have no choice but to go along. So, the argument goes, SESAC effectively has a monopoly position, and is abusing it.

Of course, the real "monopoly" here is copyright. At a quick glance, it certainly looks like SESAC is doing exactly what copyright allows -- but the structure of licensing for syndicated TV content allows SESAC to make life difficult for the broadcasters. So, I'm not really sure SESAC should really be faulted here, as it seems to be doing exactly what it was enabled to do thanks to overly broad copyright laws. At the same time, it also makes you wonder why the broadcasters don't go back to the TV program owners themselves and demand that they bundle the music performance rights as well, since there's more negotiating power there. So, while it does seem unfair for the broadcasters as the market is currently structured, I'm not sure it's an antitrust violation on SESAC's part. More a problem with how the industry licenses are set up, combined with copyright being way too broad in such situations.

There's also a separate interesting element to this lawsuit -- which is why it's SESAC being sued rather than ASCAP and BMI. ASCAP and BMI are both already limited due to previous antitrust fights and consent decrees against them, whereas SESAC has been more or less free to act this way. Either way, it's yet another lawsuit concerning aggressive use of copyright to try to demand as much money as possible, even for music that is a small part of an overall presentation of content.

Filed Under: antitrust, copyright, licensing, music, pricing power, syndication
Companies: ascap, bmi, sesac

New Consortium Says If Others Can Monetize Better Than We Can... We Deserve Their Money?

from the please-explain dept

We've pointed out in the past how silly it is to be worried about various spam/scraper sites that take content from sites (including ours) and repost it on their own. Those sites never add any real value, but just repost the content. They get no significant traffic and retain no real audience. They tend to come and go pretty quickly. Worrying about them is a total waste of time (time that can be used making sure your own site is more valuable). Yet, apparently a group of publishers has put together a "Fair Syndication Consortium" that has decided that rather than go after these sites directly, it will simply try to get the ad networks that serve ads on such sites to hand over some money to the original content creators. As far as I can tell, that's basically the content creators saying "well, if others can monetize our content better than we can, we deserve some of that cash."

That makes no sense to me. If you can't monetize your own content better than other sites, you don't deserve to be in business. If other sites are actually getting traffic and ad revenue that you think you deserve, it means you're doing a bad job giving people a real reason to visit your site and to interact with your community. Simply demanding money from the sites that have done things better makes no sense. Of course, the reality is that most of these sites haven't done things better, and don't make any money. So the whole grandstanding seems rather wasted effort.

Focus on making your own site worth visiting. Stop worrying what others are doing with your content.

Filed Under: monetizing content, plagiarism, scraping, syndication
Companies: fair syndication coalition