There's a nice buffet of mental food on the Internet. And websites and bloggers are helping themselves to huge servings of it, in the form of whatever newspapers offer online.
People who run content-starved outlets steal articles from websites and post them on their own sites, without payment.
Who cares, you might say. Most newspapers post all their articles on the web, free for anyone to read, whether they've got a subscription or not.
But many newspapers definitely care, because they make money when people visit their websites to read articles. Web advertisements are an increasingly important part of newspapers' shrinking revenue stream.
When an entire article is copied from a newspaper's website and posted on another website, fewer people go to the newspaper's website to view the original article, and the paper makes less money.
Some newspapers are trying to protect their articles from being stolen. They're trying to develop clearer "fair-use" policies, specifying for example how much of an article can be copied by a blog or website without violating the newspaper's copyright.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has gone further. Its parent company, Stephens Media, has helped grubstake a law firm called Righthaven, which is suing Internet entities that post articles from the paper without proper authorization.
Righthaven buys the copyright to a specific newspaper article and then sues the website or blog that posts all or even part of it, typically for $150,000 and the rights to the domain name of the website that allegedly commits the offense. Most of the approximately 200 lawsuits filed against organizations, ranging from the Democratic Party of Nevada to GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle, have been settled out of court.
In December, on behalf of MediaNews, owner of the Denver Post, Righthaven sued the Drudge Report for allegedly publishing the Post's content in violation of copyright law.
Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say Righthaven is abusing copyright law by buying copyrights to articles it will never use and by demanding excessive damages, particularly from small-time bloggers who can't afford to defend themselves.
Critics also don't like Righthaven's tactic of filing lawsuits without sending a warning letter first. These warnings, referred to as "takedown" or "cease-and-desist" letters, would give a website owner the chance to remove the offending content to avoid a lawsuit.
Courts in Nevada are sorting out the complexities of whether a website's copying of a newspaper article -- even if it's used in its entirety and deprives a newspaper of potential revenue -- can be justified under "fair-use" doctrine. Critics say the doctrine is more complicated than the Righthaven legal briefs would have you believe.
These critics have a point, but in the bigger picture, the newspaper industry's cause is just.
The Righthaven approach, imperfect as it is, gets to the heart of one of the most important questions in journalism: how do newspapers protect online content?
Organizations shouldn't post entire news stories on their websites, and bloggers shouldn't reproduce newspaper articles in their online diaries.
Here's why: news articles are written by journalists, who need to be paid. And most of their salaries come from advertisements. (There are exceptions of course, including OtherWords, the non-profit editorial service that happens to be distributing my op-ed to newspapers and new media.)
Newspapers' advertising revenue has tanked in recent years. For journalism to survive, newspaper websites must sell more ads.
The routine looting and scattering of a publication's website content across the blogosphere, where newspapers have no prayer reaping any profit, amounts to one more nail in the coffin of journalism. Advertising dollars will then flow to any online outfit that posts stolen news stories.
That's not only unfair, but it's bad for our democracy. We need journalists to play a watchdog role now more than ever.
Sure, Righthaven is unseemly in the way it's suing people, including "little" people. But if you have a better idea on how newspapers should safeguard their online content, lay it on me.
A former media critic for the Rocky Mountain News, Jason Salzman blogs about media issues at www.bigmedia.org
This column was originally distributed by the OtherWords syndicate.
Follow Jason Salzman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BigMediaBlog
While web-based news sites such as Think Progress etc. are getting much better at this, it should be the realization of all such site's (Big and small alike) administrators and Editors that good investigative journalism can and often is done with little or no budget or manpower, mostly, if not exclusively from the journalist's workplaces, be they an office, or from home. It shouldn't exclusively be so, but it can be to start.
I think that if something this relatively trivial is what brings traditional news down and is one of the last 'nails in the coffin', I say hammer it in, because they're too sickly and corrupt to stand on their own anyway.
If they wish to retain some presence on the internet do a headline of the top stories
that you are featuring.... but people will have to buy the paper to read them.
The internet is a delivery device, not a source.
Newspapers and their journalists are news sources... and people living out the news stories are the ultimate source.
(I DO WISH NEWSPAPERS WOULD REMEMBER THIS, they think they deserve to profit off of everything appearing on their pages, including the misery of crime victims, even the letters to the editor, offered for free by community members.)
The internet is a mode of delivery and recombination of news, not source of news (with the exception of online entities like huffpo that PAY staff to do original reporting).
Journalists are real professionals who deserve, like teachers and firemen etc., to be paid for what they do.
Nevermind the copyright trolls, who are bad, no doubt about it. But newspapers, television stations routinely quote each other. Hundreds of newspapers are filled with the same wire service stories as one another. A very large amount of this venerated material arejust press releases. There's a real question that news companies and news employees need to be frozen in the present state. TV killed off hundreds of papers in my lifetiime. With each recession over decades, newspapers have lost advertisers that never came back -- before the term blogger was invented. The mini boom in news in the early years of the 2000 decade was due to an ability to raise prices.
If newspapers were more compelling, they would charge because they could charge. There are some publications that are pulling this off. Maybe they have specialized audiences, but I'm not sure that's necessary evil.
Some newspapers are trying to protect their articles from being stolen. They're trying to develop clearer "fair-use" policies, specifying for example how much of an article can be copied by a blog or website without violating the newspaper's copyright."
Well you might want to tell Righthaven about that whole "fair use" thing, since according to them, I just infringed your copyright. That's because the majority of their suits haven't been about re-posting "entire articles" at all, but about mere quotes of a couple paragraphs from much longer articles that also linked back to the original source. So according to Righthaven, quoting = copyright infringement. Never mind the fact that the ability to quote someone when responding to them has been a fundamental part of written dialogue since the dawn of writing. Nope. You want to quote a LJR or Denver Post article to respond or criticize it? License fee please, or else we sue you! Way to defend journalistic integrity there buddy. I'd love to see the Denver Post or Huffington Post get sued every time they quote an article from another newspaper!
My recommendation to Jason: next time you set out to defend copyright trolls, make sure they have some credibility in the first place.
Righthaven’s court filings seem to be cookie cutter in nature without research into the specifics of each site they are suing. In the long run, the Denver Post and other sites using Righthaven will lose out as nobody is going to share or link back to stories on their site.
They're trying to develop clearer "fair-use" policies, specifying for example how much of an article can be copied by a blog or website without violating the newspaper's copyright.
Isn't fair-use policy set in US law, not by what the newspaper thinks is fair use?
If the newspaper is clear about what it considers fair use, and tells the public, then maybe fewer people will try to "steal" its content. And bloggers will feel comfortable using newspaper content in a way that everyone--bloggers and the newspaper--benefit from.