Steal This Article . . . Please!
So, yet one more information dinosaur, fat reserves dwindling, wakes up from
its long nap, looks around and is startled by change. Of course it then begins
trampling around with its weight's worth of lawyers, trying to put the pieces
of its broken eggs back together by legal force.
You guessed it. The dinosaur is the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and
its cohorts. They claim that search engines and news aggregators are stealing
their content, and they want to be paid for it!
Many old business models do not work well with the Internet. Rather, they may
work okay, but the Internet allows for new products and services that often
compete more efficiently with the older products and services.
Some of the first efforts to restrict linking and posting of information on
the Internet came from newspapers. I recall the first big case as having been
in Scotland, where someone created a local newspaper but had no reporting staff
and, instead, just published an online-only newspaper that linked to the previous
newspaper's online articles but "framed" them in the new newspaper's
look and feel.
The courts eventually held, in that case, that what is now called "deep
linking" is okay, but that you cannot deep link to the information of others
and try to present it in a way that consumers might be tricked into thinking
that it is your own content.
This kind of "confusion as to content" is quite common. It's a long-standing,
cyclical issue here at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
that as soon as we publish a new issue of Planning
for Higher Education, we start getting telephone calls and emails from people
who want to buy from us the books--published by others--that we reviewed in
the latest issue. (That actually may someday soon be a possibility, but it certainly
never has been thus far, and this has been happening since before the Web existed.)
After the Scottish case, things were quiet on the deep linking front, but then
public broadcasting entities and some other organizations decided to start putting
user license agreements on their web pages stating that users swore not to deep
link to any content past their front page without first getting written approval.
Public opinion and good sense beat that effort down rather quickly.
Now,
the latest: WAN, which represents 18,000 newspapers and 73 national newspaper
associations, is smarter than most dinosaurs. It is, at least, beginning its
efforts in Europe, where the principles of free speech and fair use are not
as deeply embedded in the collective psyche as in the United States.
It's talking tough: "We need search engines, and they do help consumers
navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they're building [their business]
on the back of kleptomania," says Gavin O'Reilly, president of WAN.
WAN says that the publishers are not dinosaurs, and that they have built "compelling"
portals and websites with valuable content. It argues that many users use the
search engine not to find the articles that they then read, but instead just
skim the titles and single paragraphs served up as the entire diet of news they
are reading. I'm not sure about that. I think that newspapers especially, have
made, from Day One of the Internet, a ritual of not linking out to other news
sources. Could that have been a mistake? What if USA Today had decided 10 years
ago that in addition to its own news, it would provide a Google-type search
of other newspapers? What would that look like now?
This is my first reaction, of course, but listing a news article title which
links to the article, and shows just a few sentences of the article is not theft.
I really wonder if the publishers have any hard statistics to show they are
losing readership (which they are) and subscribers (which they are) from search
engines as opposed to, say, blogs or new, original online-only websites. The
New York Times, for example, recently did the experiment of going to "Times
Select" for access to some of its content and blew past its first subscription
goal well ahead of time.*
WAN argues that the news aggregators and search engines need the content providers
in order to exist. That is arguable as well, especially if by "content
providers" you mean the ones who belong to organizations like WAN. Whether
there is such a dependence going forward, given alternative news sources like
blogs and the plethora of new functionalities coming out, is not as clear. In
fact, think about what Google and others could do to individual newspapers if
it were to decide not to include Ann Coulter's columns or The Washington Post
(One can hope.) articles in search results. I bet there'd quickly be a lawsuit
about that!
It's not at all likely that legal action based on existing regulations could
be successful for the publishers. That's obviously why they are starting down
the legislative route, wanting to change the rules after the fact. Maybe they'll
find a way to keep deep linking from being effective?
They could use a secure algorithm to randomize the addresses of every page
in the site, say once a day. Your own portal has the key and can take people
there, of course, but anyone who links to you will lose that link within 24
hours. Hmm. I wouldn't want to have to set it up, but maybe it can be done.
It would probably be cheaper than hiring the European version of Jack Abramoff.
* Something missed by many but which I appreciate very much is that before "Times
Select," you had to "register" to access NY Times articles. As
a result, I rarely linked to them in news listings that I create. When The Times
went to the new system, it required that you be a paying subscriber to access
the select stuff--like Tom Friedman's great columns--but it opened up everything
else; which means it's a lot easier to effectively deep link to The Times than
it was six months ago. Left hand/right hand? Who knows?