
DRM for news? Inside the AP's plan to "wrap" its content - habs
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/drm-for-news-inside-the-aps-plan-to-wrap-its-content.ars
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pmichaud
The plan is that they have no plan. The plan is to make a bunch of aging
executives look foolish after buying the snake oil off the back of some
consultant's cart of tricks. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the
web, its culture, and its infrastructure, and is utterly doomed to fail.

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jacquesm
They'll kill themselves. After a week or two they'll recant, a lot of $ poorer
and some experience richer.

This is actually quite comparable to Ted Nelsons' project Xanadu (or at least
parts of it).

~~~
wglb
Do you think that Xanadu could reasonably solve this problem?

~~~
jacquesm
Xanadu was ahead of its time in many ways, but the reason why the web took off
the way it did I think has to do with the free and open nature of it.

The basic idea behind xanadu was that information could be re-cited as often
as you wanted but the originator would get a slice of the cake.

The web is the opposite, it's a total free-for-all with the spammers and the
parasites being on the same level as the originators of the content. Nelson
saw it differently.

Early attempts at something like the web in Europe (minitel in France and
videotext in the netherlands and germany) tried to charge 'by the page' for
the content, but this seriously limited the amount of information available.
Information providers could set a price on their information and the 'links'
would display the price prior to activation. Billing was done through the
telco.

If every web link came with a price attached I think it would have never
gotten off the ground the way it did. Still, there are some good elements in
that philosophy and I'm sure that in the long run 'for pay' links and some
kind of citation mechanism will find their way back in to the web, simply
because they are useful and because there is much demand for it (from the
content providers side).

One potential way to realize this today is by setting up a gateway that deals
with pay-per-view content where information providers could host their data
and a plug-in based viewer (flash or something like it) that unlocks the
content if the client has enough credits and confirms they want to see it.

I hope all of this makes sense :)

~~~
wglb
Makes lots of sense.

So does it seem that Xanadu would solve what AP is trying to do?

~~~
jacquesm
It would have, but as far as I'm concerned Xanadu, as visionary as it was
turned out to be an evolutionary dead end.

This is not to be disrespectful to Ted Nelson, it's just that the good bits
are going to be recylced even if the grand vision won't be.

Some elements from Xanadu would solve the problems the AP is trying to address
but I highly doubt that it would be commercially feasible without some kind of
collusion between all the news providers. After all, as long as one of them
stays free that one will end up with all the customers in their basket.

It's a free market, and the market deals harshly with those that try to sell
lemons while the neighbours find a way to give them away and still make a
profit.

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mildweed
I am pleased to see another organization adopting a 'standard' microformat, in
this case, hNews.

Microformats are the bridge by which we're going to get to the truly Semantic
Web.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes, this is less absurd than I thought it was going to be; it's basically a
polite watermark. My guess is that they'll ignore micro-users like mini-
bloggers but throw the book at any volume sites that strip the 'DRM' and
recycle the content without attribution.

I think rumors of AP's suicide/death are rather overblown, and they're just
looking for a way to share without giving away the farm. Of course, they might
have done better to use something like a creative commons license and choose
terms that would encapsulate their legitimate commercial interest. On the
other hand there's no ML standard for CC licensing that I know of.

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jrockway
Alternate title: "How to spend a lot of money solving a non-problem."

~~~
ajp
More Like "How to spend a lot of money not solving a non-problem."

~~~
jrockway
Agreed.

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RyanMcGreal
"[C]ontent providers have the right to decide what happens to their content
and on what terms".

\-- Gavin O'Reilly, Chairman, Automated Content Access Protocol

If you don't want people using the content you created, you shouldn't be in
the content creation business.

~~~
_pi
I've heard this statement before in many different incarnations some with
intonations of piracy, some without. However they all fail to see the basis of
where the other party is coming from. They want to be adequately rewarded for
you using their content. However adequately differs very much from person to
person, you may think that a news story costs a quarter to read, I may think
it costs 15 cents, the CEO of AP may think it costs a buck fifty, and the 13
year old down the street thinks AP should pay him to read the news story.

The problem that news companies suffer that makes this a significantly
different problem for them rather than a company like the RIAA is that
journalists get paid by the company as a primary source of income, journalists
have to get sent places which costs the company money, and the company's
primary source of revenue is the output of the journalists. For a second lets
forget print media ever existed, in the current state of the web where media
such as this is demanded by users to be free this is a failing business
because of extravagant costs, and almost no profits. Why print media is a
failing is because less people buy print and more people read it online.

There are players who beat the market by having a niche audience, low costs,
and a high price, ie the Economist. Unlike the NY Times or AP they didn't have
to send several photographers and journalists to China several times for pre,
during, and post Olympics. While I don't necessarily agree with this business
model, an exchange of cash has to exist somewhere, finding where such an
exchange is most acceptable is a another story.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Market value comes from scarcity. When you need a million dollar press to
print a newspaper, you can charge for it because the capital cost is a big
barrier to the entry of competitors.

When the cost of printing collapses (to use the expression from Clay Shirky),
the barrier to entry disappears, and the value derived from scarcity
disappears with it.

AP's scheme amounts to a technical and/or legal attempt to reimpose an
artificial scarcity so it can once again sell at a premium.

Their scheme is doomed.

~~~
_pi
I disagree, I still believe that the revenue streams are incompatible (due to
culture, web users don't want to pay) or insufficient (such as ads) for a news
agency to operate. What needs to happen is for someone to suggest a web
culture compatible revenue stream that is sufficient to quench the financial
need of a news agencies operations. This is lame attempt to do so, i.e. an
iTunes for news segments. But at the end of the things the main problem is
that users still don't want to pay for these things.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
_the main problem is that users still don't want to pay for these things_

That's only a problem if your business model depends on users paying for these
things - i.e. if your business model depends on scarcity that doesn't exist.

If they would only stop being precious for a minute, the newsmedia would
recognize that they're already familiar with the idea of making money from
sources other than the actual content consumers. After all, it was newspapers
that popularized the revenue-from-advertising model in the first place, a
model that allowed them to deliver newspapers very cheaply (sometimes freely)
to their readers.

The smartest thing AP and other newsmedia can do is abandon their micropayment
pipe dreams and start getting creative about new ways to leverage their assets
for revenue.

~~~
_pi
The problem is that they have tried that. It doesn't work because web
advertising is significantly cheaper than print advertising is, especially
because you cannot guarantee that someone has seen the advert on the web.
Which is why they're currently losing money. A full page ad in the NY times on
the cover is 75,000$ or 100,000$ depending on the day, one could only dream of
making that kind of money on web adverts.

[http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_new...](http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_news_147349.htm)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
The trick is to get creative about finding new sources of value in their
assets. Maybe the answer isn't merely more advertising, but finding new
revenue streams in addition to straight ad sales. Given that people flat-out
won't pay for online news. the newsmedia have no other choice.

~~~
_pi
At this point you'd have to suggest a solution, because I cannot get what
you're hinting at. If you can't my point original point is evident: the news
agencies are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I'm not actually hinting at anything. I simply don't know what the solution
will look like. What I do know is that micropayments from readers do not work
and will not work.

That means either:

1) the corporate newsmedia will come up with some new revenue stream by
discovering or developing some new source of value from their assets, or

2) they will fail.

Look at Google. They started out as a _search company_. With no real idea how
to generate revenue, they came up with a way to aggregate hyperlinks across
websites to produce surprisingly helpful page results for keyword searches.

It was the gargantuan data set they managed to accumulate over the course of
indexing the internet and generating search results that finally gave them the
revenue stream they needed.

Google is now an _advertising company_. They generate revenue by selling
contextual advertising embedded in web pages (they get website owners to agree
to this advertising by sharing some of their revenue).

That's a profoundly creative way of leveraging assets to generate revenue by
providing a scarce, valuable service: _scarce_ because only Google has the
infrastructure, data, analytical expertise and market reach to provide it; and
_valuable_ because advertisers gain more revenue from increased sales than it
costs them to buy Google ads.

The newsmedia, until now, have been mainly in the _advertising business_ , in
which the exercise of gathering, reporting and distributing the news served as
a mechanism for attracting advertising revenue (in much the same way that
indexing the internet and providing search results is Google's mechanism for
attracting advertising revenue).

 _The media were never particularly in the business of selling the news to
their readers_. Their customers were advertisers, not readers; and what they
sold was not news but the eyeballs of their readers.

That business model is now dying. Some media firms - either existing firms
that can change their stripes or some new firm that discovers and exploits an
opportunity - will find a new business model in which they sell something
scarce and valuable to someone willing to pay for it.

Again, those media firms that fail to do this will fail.

If you've got an hour or so, there's a really entertaining lecture by Cory
Doctorow on the HN front page right now:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=734138>

------
callahad
I'm stuck on the last bit of their target case:

 _What I'm talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright
folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into
their blog. They don't even comment on it. And it happens way more than most
people realize._

If people don't realize this is happening, how can it be a problem? If a blog
without readers violates copyright, does it hurt the AP?

~~~
anigbrowl
I realize it's happening. I think what he means is that most people don't
think about it much.

However, if you've used Google News for a long time after a while you notice
that there's a lot of no-original-content websites masquerading as news
outlets, not unlike the domain squatters with 'search result' pages for high-
ranking searches. In my opinion it's a kind of black-hat SEO.

Try looking at a news story in GN and you'll see that the top story has maybe
'5000 similar stories'. The first page or two will be related or fully
rewritten stories, but if you go past the first 100 results you'll see a lot
of junk websites that just host the top 20 news stories and monetize them with
adwords. They may only make $10 a day that way, but it's diluting AP's brand a
bit in the process.

~~~
callahad
That's a great point. I don't use Google News, but I can definitely see brand
dilution happening in that manner.

