Newspapers vs. Aggregators: Understanding the Economics of the Internet

Following the frighteningly dangerous thinking of Judge Richard Posner – proposing rewriting copyright law to outlaw linking to and summarizing (aka talking about) news stories – now we have two more lemming lawyers following him off the cliff in a column written by the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Connie Schultz.

First note well that Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown as she calls on her newspapers and employer (my former employer, Advance Publications) and fellow columnists to influence Congress to remake copyright. She should be registered as a lobbyist. No joke.

Schultz says that David Marburger, an alleged First Amendment attorney for her paper, and his economics-professor brother, Daniel, have concocted their own dangerous thinking, proposing the copyright law be changed to insist that a newspaper’s story should appear only on its own web site for the first 24 hours before it can be aggregated or retold.

Incredible. So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with a Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours. A First Amendment lawyer said this.

They make vague reference to the hot news doctrine the AP has been trying to dig up from its very deep grave. Note that their definition of "hot" is the cycle of newspaper publishing, not the cycle of news itself. Look at how fast the Michael Jackson news spread. Under these guys’ scheme, TMZ would have had exclusive right to publish his death for a day. Well, except it’s not a newspaper. And what they care about is protecting newspapers.

Schultz and the Marbergers complain about what they call the “free-riding” of aggregators, et al. But they simply don’t understand the economics of the internet. It’s the newspapers that are free-riding, getting the benefit of links.

These newspaper people are the ones trying to act as if they own the news and can monopolize it. Those days are over, thank God.

LATER: Schultz has responded in the comments here. I have responded in turn. And I have just sent this message to the office of her husband:

Please consider this a press inquiry:

I want to know Sen. Brown’s stand on his wife’s column in the Plain Dealer on attempting to rewrite copyright law to give newspapers a 24-hour period of exclusivity on the news they report.

Does the senator support this legislation?

What will the senator vote on this legislation?

Will the senator recuse himself from voting on this legislation, considering his wife’s role in lobbying Congress on the issue?

Is his wife registered as a lobbyist?

Comments

[jayminho:]

totally disagree. look at the music scene and later, the movie industry.
RIAA with all that money and lobby, couldnt do sh* againts p2p and torrents.. its not some lady and her husband that will be able to do.
its over. the only salvation for them (newspaper) and old media. it is to block all internet traffic, and filter everything. what would be pretty funny,

1- after decades of pointing their finger to china, cuba, iran and others, they would be doing the same

2- people would still find ways to bypass the filters.

Jun 30 09:24 AM

[newsman:]

Mr. Jarvis pretends that aggregation is about commenting upon or linking to work produced by others, when it's really about outright theft. I'm a newspaper reporter, and I'll tell you how it works.
I write a story, maybe the product of several hours' work or several days', and we post it on our web site. Five minutes later, the first four or five paragraphs of my story, with a similar headline, appears on a local aggregator site, followed by a link to my story.
So, both of our sites have my story, with a headline and several graphs of copy, followed by a link to read more. Our site ate all the expense for my work. Their site stole my work.
While the copyright law, as described by Jarvis, sounds absurd, aggregators are a genuine problem.

Jun 30 09:44 AM

[Dispundit:]

Newsman, what you are describing is plagiarism, not aggregation.

Aggregation in the form of a headline, and a couple of sentences, and in no way the meat of the the item is equivalent to modern day word of mouth. Just try to survive without links.

However if you've every "attributed" anything in a story to another outlet, newspaper or journalist then you too are guilty of aggregation, which I would argue is just fine.


On Jun 30 09:44 AM newsman wrote:

> Mr. Jarvis pretends that aggregation is about commenting upon or
> linking to work produced by others, when it's really about outright
> theft. I'm a newspaper reporter, and I'll tell you how it works.
>
> I write a story, maybe the product of several hours' work or several
> days', and we post it on our web site. Five minutes later, the first
> four or five paragraphs of my story, with a similar headline, appears
> on a local aggregator site, followed by a link to my story.
> So, both of our sites have my story, with a headline and several
> graphs of copy, followed by a link to read more. Our site ate all
> the expense for my work. Their site stole my work.
> While the copyright law, as described by Jarvis, sounds absurd, aggregators
> are a genuine problem.

Jun 30 04:16 PM

[hankscott:]

Jeff:
Without offering a judgement on the question of regulating aggregation, I have to point out some inaccuracies in what you say. No proposed regulation or law regarding aggregators that I've heard about would bar any newspaper or website or radio or TV station from matching a newspaper's story. They just couldn't use that story. In other words, if the Plain Dealer reported that the governor had returned from a tryst in Argentina, any competitive news organization that could get the facts would be free to publish its own story. That's the way we did it in the days before the Internet. And smart reporters never just copied the work of the first paper to break the news. I remember well the day that I had an "exclusive" at a Raleigh, NC, afternoon newspaper. The competing morning paper ran essentially the same story under its reporter's byline. The problem was, I was wrong. While I was embarrassed to have made a mistake, the morning newspaper reporter was shown to be inaccurate and a plagiarist.

Jul 07 09:00 AM