International publishers demand new intellectual property rights protection to safeguard the future of journalism.
That’s the title of a press release distributed late last week by the European Publishers Councel (EPC), which you can find here. Pretty heavy stuff, right? They don’t ask, they demand. They’re not looking for more effective application of the current IP rights protection, they want an entirely new one. And once they’ve secured that, the future of journalism will be safeguarded (hold the applause).
The rest of the news release contains more gems, like this quote from Gavin O’Reilly, Group Chief Executive Officer, Independent News & Media, President of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and Chairman of ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol):
“We continue to attract ever greater audiences for our content but, unlike in the print or TV business models, we are not the ones making the money out of our content. This is unsustainable. Publishers failing will benefit no-one, least of all consumers, or indeed the search engines and other aggregators who currently make huge profits on the back of our intellectual property”.
Whether you agree with the man or not, read Danny Sullivan’s many excellent blog posts on this topic to get some perspective. My personal favorite is this one: “Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It”. There’s no better response to O’Reilly’s assertions.
So what exactly prompted the EPC to push out the press release, once again underscoring their desperation in finding a viable business model now that media usage and content generation has fragmented to a point where the world of information consumption is simply not what it used to be anymore, whether publishers like it or not? Turns out the Council has started petitioning Europe’s media commissioner Viviane Reding against unpaid use of their members’ content by aggregators and search engines.
Their intentions are neatly outlined in this Hamburg Declaration (PDF), which is rapidly garnering loads of signatures from publishers around the world, including Mathias Döpfner (Axel Springer AG, Germany), James Murdoch (News Corp, Europe and Asia), The Rt. Hon. The Viscount Rothermere, (Daily Mail and General Trust, UK), Ian Smith (Reed Elsevier, UK), Hannu Syrjanen (Sanoma, Finland), Robert Thomson (Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal, US) and many more. An excerpt from the declaration:
Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost. We disagree with those who maintain that freedom of information is only established when everything is available at no cost. Universal access to our services should be available, but going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission.
Translation: we still want all the traffic Google is sending our way for free so we can generate enough page views to keep our advertisers happy and revenues up (barely), but we also want to be able to charge people for reading our content and punish those who spread this information to even more people. Surely, that will safeguard journalism.
Miss Reding, you can safely ignore this declaration, no matter how many dinosaurs link their name to it. And feel free to quote me on that anywhere on the Web.
I think they’re asking for a little too much.
It would be nice to have an experiment where google bans a major newspaper for a month, gather the data and see who needs who the most!
When NYT makes its content paid, goog stops indexing it. This is unfair, we need to find a workaround.
I have come up with solution. Unpaid customers and search engines see the news story as only-text, no image, single page format, with ads. While paid customers will see the same story with paragraph/page formatted text with images.
search engines….its like trying to understand the universe and googl is god.
Re: “going forward, we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission”
Guys, that’s why Websites have this thing called “robots.txt”. If you don’t want your property used by Google, as you see it, then the solution is in your own hands.
http://en.wikip...wiki/Robots.txt
That would be a simple solution, I agree. But for argument’s sake, can we say, everything that is on the Internet is available for search engines to index?
Unless they place a lock called “robots.txt” on it?
Isn’t it like the same thing as saying if you find someone’s home unlocked, its okay to enter and take what you want.
Or if you find someone’s Wifi open, it is fine to use it.
Not sure if those two examples parallel the situation, but food for thought.
“Isn’t it like the same thing as saying if you find someone’s home unlocked, its okay to enter and take what you want.”
No, it’s like saying if you put a big poster up in town, it’s ok for people to take a photo of it. – Having a website is *actively* encouraging people to see your content (for free if you don’t have a paywall).
If you don’t want people to see your content for free, don’t put it on a web site they can see without paying you – no index it & put it behind a paywall.
Open Wifi is more iffy – it is more reasonable to assume that people might not know about passwords, etc, although some people leave their Wifi open on purpose for others to use (admitedly not many i know)
The ridiculous thing is, that they want to be listed. They even think they have the right to be listed. But they want money to be listed ….
Mrs. Reding is encouraging the music industry to ‘think different’ instead of promoting regulation. http://www.ther...digital_europe/
I ‘m pretty sure she’s not an easy target to fool (no matter how many signatures you have)
And you know what?
Europeans are in general less clueless in this sort of bullshit-statements…at least they used to be/should be.
You in America (together with the Jews) seem to have the god-given right to progress, no matter what. Today, some of us – starting with us Europeans – are staring to take offence at this. WE DO NOT LIKE YOUR NOTION OF MORE, YOUR NOTION OF PROGRESS. You are welcome to hate us back.
You’re an idiot. Go away.
The moment NYT makes its contents paid, goog cant index it. This is unfair, and we should find a workaround..
Muito bom seu blog.
Idiots! Go ahead and take your ball (content) and go home, just be sure to let me know how the “lets stop progress” works out for you all.
Another question: What would these publishers say if Google would start to charge for indexing their sites or kick them out of the index? Maybe that would make them think about new strategies.
Btw: I blogged some of these potential strategies at http://blog.fir...media.de/?p=843
Viviane Reding won’t be persuaded that easily! I can’t imagine how anyone with decent advisors can even contemplate “solutions” like this…
Unless they are adopting the same strategy as music labels: we know the model is broken and we are broken, but we will use legal and regulatory methods to keep revenue flowing as long as possible before we reincarnate
Sounds like they want google to pay them to link to their content. Not going to happen. They have too many competitors who would love the traffic for free.
This document is of great historical importance.
what if google black listed their webpages?
guess what they will say then
I still don’t quite understand how indexing and linking to original content is supposed to be an IP infringement. At no point is the product/service (in this case the content) being reproduced or even re-sold.
Search engines and aggregators are not selling the content itself, they are selling a service that allows people to locate the content efficiently. There is no reason why content providers should get a cut of this, since they aren’t involved in providing this service at all.
Let me apply an “old world” example:
Let’s say that I’m a person who is very knowledgeable about where to buy TVs at a low cost. I decide to sell my consulting services to people who are looking to buy TVs. As part of this service I obviously go to each of the electronics stores to find out pricing, special offers, etc. and then use this data to advise my clients. I still direct clients to the electronics store for the actual TV purchase.
Would the electronics store have a right to claim part of my revenues as a consultant because my service is based on directing clients to goods that they provide? ….I should think not!
The newspaper industry’s argument would make more sense if the entire content was being offered directly by aggregators/search engines, but this way it just seems ridiculous.
I have to agree with Daniel here. The newspaper industry obviously needs some revamping of their business model, and is undergoing fundamental changes.
This does not mean they should be grasping at straws and acting defensively in fighting against sweeping trends. They should instead learn how to embrace the new models and adapt to it.
There is a win-win here for publishers in having more of an audience know about their content and search engines being able to provide greater value to their users. Collaboration is the name of the game, not throwing up walls.
Unlike the situation in the US, particularly the german media still makes a wagonload of money each month. It is decreasing, but a lot of bucks are coming out of their magazines and newspapers. They are used to profit rates above 10%. As they observed the US situation and know, that the US is running ahead in terms of economy and usage of web, they already do what they are used to do: If you can’t cope with new situations, you have to turn the adjustment screws (politicians). That’s what we’ve also seen with carmakers, pharma and stuff. Look at the guys from Pfizer and Monsanto. It is an international pattern. They do not enter the european markets by advertising, they do it by putting their staff at the most influential positions in the European Administration in Brussels andt Strasbourg…
The only true understanding for how search engines work is to keep publishing fresh, unique content that will constantly get indexed by Bing, Google, MSN & YaHoO! , for potentially top search engine positions and capitalize on free search engine traffic
To set the record straight, publishers generally and ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) specifically are not asking anyone for a change in European law. Rather, ACAP is, in a transparent and open way, creating tools so that copyright and licences can work in a machine-to-machine way without needing a human somewhere in the middle. This reflects the reality of the internet where so much depends on computers being able to operate autonomously on a massive scale, for example when search engines create their indexes. What ACAP is asking of regulators is for recognition that ACAP is just as valid a way of writing a licence as a contract on paper written by a lawyer, and so is one of the solutions to the digital rights conundrum. We want them to encourage search engines and other aggregators to use this tool to demonstrate commitment to their oft-stated acknowledgement that content belongs to the content providers and it is for them, the rightsholders, to decide how and on what terms third parties should use it. Members of the ACAP community also want to use it to facilitate other machine-to-machine functions unrelated to search, such as permissioning use of content by other third parties. ACAP is not just about money, but about making content widely available in the existing copyright framework which has driven the immense growth in the creation and availability of content for hundreds of years. Copyright is the cornerstone of innovation and progress in publishing as well the other creative industries. ACAP is one step towards making it continue to work in the 21st century.”