Tighter copyright law could save newspapers: Connie Schultz - Connie Schultz, ... - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 Jul 09
  

  amelia crater

  marburger payperview

• 07 Jul 09
  

  Logan Anderson
• 04 Jul 09
  

  Patrick O'Keefe
  • Connie Schultz/Plain Dealer Columnist
  • David and Daniel Marburger think they have the answer: Change the federal copyright law. I think they are right.
  • 12 more annotations...
  • • David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer at Baker Hostetler who has represented newspapers, including The Plain Dealer, for nearly 30 years. Daniel is an economics professor at Arkansas State University.

    • "I heard [Plain Dealer Editor] Susan Goldberg talking about how revenue from online advertising is pathetically low and newspapers can't recoup their investment. As soon as she said it, the wheels started turning. You have all these free riders like Daily Beast and Newser and local television stations aggregating your stories online while diverting readers and advertisers from your site. And they're doing it for a fraction of the cost of the newspapers that generated the original copy.

      
      

      "And it hit me: All those theories out there on how to prop up newspapers -- why isn't anyone saying this? Why aren't we talking about how this free-riding by aggregators affects the market rate for everyone? "

    • "Free-riding is ubiquitous," David says. "These parasitic aggregators are capturing the heart of the stories so that readers have no need to visit the site of the original story."
    • Meanwhile, parasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can't match. The inevitable consequence: diminished revenue and staff cuts.
    • The Marburgers propose a change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators' stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.
    • There is precedent for this change, David Marburger says. In 1918, the Associated Press sued International News Service for essentially the same problem now posed to newspapers by Web aggregators. INS was copying or rewriting AP stories and transmitting them by telegraph and telephone to papers in western U.S. time zones.
    • The Supreme Court ruled that INS engaged in unfair competition that ultimately would drive AP out of business. It enjoined INS from reproducing the AP stories, but only for a brief period while AP's dispatches had commercial value.
    • The court decision was diluted over time. In 1976, Congress further weakened the ruling with a new section in the copyright bill that didn't anticipate future problems of the Internet.
    • 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.

    • Marburger anticipates the rebuttal: "Newspapers want to monopolize the truth."

      
      

      His response: "No, we want to temporarily stop the unfair practice of those who use the sweat of our brow to compete against us."

    • I implore fellow columnists to add their voices to the chorus and nudge not only elected leaders, but leaders in our own companies. Plain Dealer Publisher Terry Egger backs the Marburger plan. Other news organizations should join him, including Advance Publications, which owns this paper.
• 30 Jun 09
  

  Jonathan Bailey

  118 newspapers copyrightlaw

• 29 Jun 09
  

  Randy Bennett

Would you like to comment?

Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.