The old media wants to change the copyright laws to 'spread the wealth around'

[DainBramaged]

Copyright law reform as one remedy for plummeting profits at traditional news organizations was proposed at a media affairs panel organized by the non-profit Center for Communication and hosted by Fordham University earlier this month.

Former public television executive and current Fordham Professor William F. Baker moderated the event which was called “The Audience: How America Uses its Media.” On the panel: Nielsen executive Gerry Byrne and media lawyer Dean Ringel, a partner at the New York law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel.

Ringel advocated introducing compulsory licensing fees for Web-based agregators or re-distributors of news content. Under Ringel’s system, sites like Google would be required to share profits with or pay a fee to any news organization whose content they post, in a system similar to the compulsory licensing system than currently manages rights for cable television and music.

He noted that current copyright law protects the specific expression of information but does not protect the work necessary to obtain that information. Ringel argued that papers like the New York Times, which spend prodigious sums on reporter security in dangerous places around the globe, should get some of the revenue made by third-parties who distribute their content.

Ringel’s proposed system would apply only to sites obtaining revenue from re-posting news content. Sites which did not charge fees or seek advertising revenue, and perhaps even some commercial sites whose readership is below a certain threshold, would be exempt from the requirements.

Denying profits to newspapers and magazines is to “risk depriving our society as a whole of neutral, professional, prepared and analytic information” said Ringel. Dr. Baker echoed Ringel’s statement by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never shall be.” All three participants agreed a reliably informed citizenry underpins any successful democracy.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004047983


The WaPo is closing it's news bureaus in NYC, LA and Chicago, the Toronto Star is cutting one fifth of it's newsroom staff. They haven't realized tree-based media is going to go the way of the dodo. And it's too bad we can't give it a shove. people don't want to read Yesterday's news any more, they want news now. And paper isn't the answer any more.

[flow_urgirl]

1. Well I may have some profit from it

Define -news organisation- for me as I am a freelance journalist. How do I profit should this revenue law go ahead?

[PVnRT]

2. I think you would be a "primary" source

But since you're not a publisher, it wouldn't affect you. It seems to only affect those papers and websites that print things from other sources, which would have a huge impact on sites like Alternet.

They may claim this is to "save newspapers," but I think the real goal is to shut down websites that collect and disseminate news from many different sources. Then these papers can charge subscription fees to read their content in one place.

[Igel]

3. Can of worms.

Traditionally, content has been non-copyrightable. So if you want to use information from the Geophysical Letters, the AATSEEL Journal, or the New York Times you could. Whether in class and on the class website, in a blog, in your own research, or when summarizing the news on your local NPR station. There have been professional standards for things like plagiarism, but plagiarism isn't the same as copyright violation.

This tries to create a new class: Web-based news aggregators. It tries to make sure that it affects a small minority of sites, because to affect a large number would make the regulation and law difficult to get passed. Of course, it opens a can of worms.

The course Website that posts content, for example. It has no advertising revenue, but if the course is Web-based it's essentially a service for hire. It aggregates information from other sources--some originally written and then migrated to EBSCO or other online aggregate sources, some originally online. It seems like this would be covered--unless the law is made even more cumbersome to make sure it only affects the leprotic. Or does having it behind a sign-in screen make it different? If sign-in were free, would it matter?

But what if I produce something and then later put it on the web? The first use wasn't a violation--was the second use? And if I give due attestation to it so that they can link back to the original site?

Lots of quirks and problems in all of this. It's a problem with a law that aims at a specific kind of behavior-directed goal. If it's a strictly moral kind of crime, then it's easy to define the class affected, and juries have reasonable leeway. Here the jury would have leeway, but the law would be so detailed and so stipulative that seeing any kind of moral or ethical point would be difficult for jurors, so they'd have little leeway. An automaton could do as well.

That said, I think the motivation you cite is your own and, while it can probably be generalized over a set of people who don't receive newspapers, I don't think it covers even 2/3 of those who desubscribed.