On The Media

I listened with half an ear until I heard that the solution is to increase the liability for "fair use." So I may be off point, but we are a small not for profit, who aren't able to spend alot of money on legal advice or defenses, but have generally found that we can share articles in small settings for the purposes of education in non-profit settings. Does the proposed solution create more hazard for organizations like us trying to distribute small amounts of content for public education in non-profit settings?

An avid listener with a small request, is there anyway the "present and future models for monetizing newspaper..." jingle can be made available in mp3 or downloadable form? It's just so catchy

Take a step back. This story directly identifies the disconnect between "dinosaurs" and folks from the present day. When people see an interesting story and copy it to show their friends your obscure magazine receives free publicity. Viewing republishing as a problem is unwise. The majority of reposts come from civilians excited or interested in the material reposted. Sharing an interesting article with friends is a compliment to the writer. You should examine your motivation. Information or $$$$$$$$?

While I in no way doubt the validity of the study that the "Fair Syndication Consortium" has done, your coverage was missing two important points:

Any blogger of even moderate note knows that there are, perhaps, millions of "Blogs" that don't actually publish anything, but rather copy-paste text on trending topics in search into automated blogs to farm search relevance and maybe get a couple of ad clicks. This affects not just newspapers, but bloggers and anyone who publishes on the web.

However, to use spammers to paint actual human bloggers as thieves is disingenuous. When taken in aggregate, sure these numbers sound horrendous, but I would be much more interested to see a correlation between these "pirates" and, say, Alexa rankings. My guess is if you narrowed these numbers to people in the top 1,000,000 blogs, they would drop precipitously. Moreover, to think that you are going to "partner" with, not just the blog spam, but the bottom tier bloggers is naive at best.

Finally, speaking as a technologist and someone who is, arguably, expert in web syndication technologies, the solutions they have proposed are wholly unworkable. It is also unforgivable that "On the Media" failed to note that the "Fair Syndication Consortium" is entirely the making of Attributor, a software company attempting to sell a technological pig in a poke to these media companies.

They may take legal aim at AdSense and DoubleClick, but if you think Google and Microsoft don't already treat this as a top tier problem, you are kidding yourself. Blog spam reduces the value of their advertising, corrupts their search utility, and makes their users angry. Unless these publishers want to put a "Disallow: /" line in their robots.txt file, they are going to have to accept that their text is going to end up "repurposed" for blog spam, email spam, and spam of any nature where someone wants human written text that will satisfy filters.

Firstly, I agree fully with Robert Cooper.

And I would like to add, that copyright infringment is not the same as theft, to claim otherwise would also be disingenuous.

Theft is about property changing hands, meaning the original owner has no access to the stolen object anymore.

Now in the case of the newspaper articles being copied and pasted at 'spam-blogs', the newspapers still have access to their own articles. So that's not stolen.

However, it is likely that copyright infringement has taken place, and that's also illegal, it just falls under another law.

Please, in future, try to make that distinction in your reports. As the discussion on copyright and its infringement is difficult enough to grasp already, without it being muddied with the terms 'stealing' and 'theft'.

@Robert,

While the NPR piece did not mention it, Alexa data was provided in the research. From the report, "38% of the sites were ranked in the top 100k most traficked sites". It also says that Blogs represented less than 10% of the total.

While the Attributor connection to the Fair Syndication Consortium is a bit alarming, this is the only solution being proposed that would keep content free, so I am interested in seeing it progress.

@John

Fair enough. I think there are maybe some other factors I would want to look at if you are talking about the "100K most trafficked sites" -- the first being, how many are paying for stories? I know I worked on one project (that has changed hands several times now) that syndicated AP health stories to physician/hospital sites. We paid AP for the privilege, but I am not sure that a simple text search for "JohnQMD.com" would show this. Either way...

When the story aired, much of the discussion was SPECIFICALLY about bloggers. If they represent such I small part of the problem, I would ask why they were the focus of the on-air (or on-podcast in my case) discussion.

Moreover, Attributor isn't even remotely the only company working to address this. OTM has covered a number of others in the past. Moreover, in my opinion, what Attrubutor is pushing doesn't fit the web workflow at all, and is based on some unworkable DRM-ish stuff for feeds that will never fly.