

Laws to Save Journalism (or The Most Unintentionally Funny Thing I've Read All Day) - TomOfTTB
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503000.html

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knightinblue
This is like watching dinosaurs attempting to do physics.

Everytime they hear Google mention the idea of 'opt out if you don't like it',
they start crying 'Publishers should not have to choose between protecting
their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the
Internet'. So they want google to crawl their pages, and then pay them
something on top for indexing them.

That's like asking the police to protect your neighborhood and then charging
them a monthly fee on top for the policing.

It's this ridiculous sense of entitlement that's the most sickening out of all
this.

~~~
anamax
> they start crying 'Publishers should not have to choose between protecting
> their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the
> Internet'.

And they don't have to choose. Google search results don't include very much
of the content so a user has to click on the link to go to their site to see
said content. They're free to do whatever they want to do to protect content
on their site. They're free to do whatever they want to do to monetize said
content.

When pushed, their complaints seem to be:

(1) when they implement protections, users go elsewhere

(2) They can't get enough ad revenue from their pages.

(3) Other folks "steal" their content and google will find said stolen content
and help users find it. (In many cases, said other "copies" are completely
legit. The sneer quotes are because they object when someone else reports the
same news.)

(4) Google makes money online and we're not, and since we're providing content
and Google is just telling folks how to find it, Google is clearly cheating
somehow.

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swombat
This reads like a bad joke!... To summarise, their proposal to "save the news
industry" is to:

\- make it illegal for search engines to index sites without asking for
explicit permission from each and every site

\- make it illegal for people to report on "hot news" that has been broken by
one specific outlet first without paying that first outlet

\- remove monopoly caps on news organisations, allowing them to become even
bigger than news corp (as if that wasn't big enough already)

\- give some tax breaks to the news industry and pay people to post ads in
newspapers instead of craigslist

...

What world do the authors of this article live in? I sure hope it's not mine.

~~~
Tangurena
The authors of that article live in a world where companies like the RIAA who
sue their customers are considered heroes.

------
njharman
I'm not a journalist, but I am in the industry (developer for metro daily).

This is one of the more clueless and wrong headed set of ideas I've seen. I'd
be preaching to the choir explaining why I believe that here. So, instead I'll
make some important points that often seem to be forgotton.

Talking heads are not the newspaper industry. I don't believe the papers I'm
involved with would agree with any of these ideas.

The AP is not the newspaper industry. Many papers despise what the AP is doing
and are considering dumping them. (fear of that is causing the AP to freak out
and do stupid shit)

National Big Name newspapers are not the newspaper industry. They get the
attention cause they're big and have household names. But by far most papers,
most circulation and most readership are small metro and community papers.

Newspapers are not the newspaper industry. There is a wide range of owners,
ideas, and plans amongst newspapers. Some of the ideas are good some are bad.
Some papers will shutdown, some will thrive, some will no longer be newspaper
companies.

~~~
tm
Good points all around. I've found developers at newspaper orgs often have
better solutions to the problems in the industry then the 'media veterans'
themselves.

Which paper do you work for? Would love to get in touch (alex at newscred dot
com).

------
johnnybgoode
I thought this was going to be a funny column about questionable laws intended
to "save journalism".

 _Journalism does not need a bailout, but it does need a sort of "recovery
act" to bring the legal landscape in line with today's publishing
technologies._

These guys have learned their lesson well: When asking for a bailout, don't
call it a bailout.

But to be fair, they didn't ask for any _direct_ financial subsidies.

~~~
netsp
I would far prefer direct subsidies to what this article implies.

------
alanthonyc
You may think it's funny, and to a certain extent, I do to and for the same
reasons. But, the kind of thinking exhibited by the writer is also dangerous
in tharlt his writings could actually influence people in the wrong way. There
have been plenty of stupid laws passed before, here and in other places.

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silentOpen
"... the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers
their search functions, is not fair use but infringement."

Must... restrain... cluebat.

------
nl
I hope everyone here knows about the Overton Window
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window>).

Viewed in that light this article isn't dumb, and the authors aren't stupid.
They are re-framing the debate in terms of copyright law reform, public good
and public policy rather than technical merit and economics.

Notice how the comments here are about how dumb their ideas are? That's what
they want - for their ideas to be accepted as part of a valid debate.

------
bobbyi
If you have a better proposal on how to save journalism, I'd love to hear it.

I like the idea of helping news organizations convert into nonprofits much
better than Eric Schmidt's suggestion that they abandon the journalism
"product" and find a new one.

~~~
jgilliam
Nationalize a few newspapers. A couple billion dollars a year would finance an
incredible number of investigative journalists, and it would be far better for
democracy than what we currently have -- dumbed down news designed to maximize
viewership and ad sales.

~~~
ckinnan
How exactly is state-controlled media good for democracy?

~~~
furyg3
State-funded _doesn't_ mean state-run. On it's face, I agree that government
being remotely associated with media is a bad thing. The fact of the matter
is, though, that the quality of reporting that comes out of publicly-funded
news organizations generally exceeds that of their private counterparts.

BBC news is one example (corporate alternatives? Telegraph/Daily mail). In the
US, the _only_ good national source of news on television is the News Hour on
PBS. Frontline, as dramatic as it is, is much more palatable and thorough than
its corporate investigative-journalist counterparts. Similarly, Public radio
stands alone as a good source of news and commentary.

Many European countries have followed the model of the BBC, with very good
results. Holland (where I'm living) has an interesting model where public
broadcasting organizations make tv/radio programs, and those organizations are
allocated money and airtime by the government based on their membership/viewer
numbers.

Just because there are conflict-of-interest problems with public (government)
money funding the press doesn't mean that there aren't equally serious
conflict-of-interest problems between private (commercial) money doing the
same.

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jimboyoungblood
if you didn't notice, the authors are NOT journalists:

"Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown are partners in the Washington office of
Baker Hostetler. They specialize in media and First Amendment law."

obviously if congress were to pass these idiotic laws, this wouldn't translate
to any more business for their law firm. noooooooo sir it wouldn't. they're
just trying to defend journalism!

------
vaksel
Surprise surprise, the authors are lawyers

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inerte
Don't editorialize the title, TomOfTTB.

~~~
TomOfTTB
People do it all the time. There's no rule against it. More to the point when
someone (in this case me) submits an article what they are doing is sharing
something they found interesting with the rest of the community.

In that sense I don't see how it's unreasonable to give my take on the article
in the title.

~~~
inerte
Two wrongs don't make a right. The guidelines, although not rules, ask you not
to do it. If the article is interesting, it'll get upvotes.

Your take might be different than mine, and more importantly, than the article
author. If you thing the USA Senate (including a presidential candidate who
snatched the popular vote), journalism's fate, new laws, and people with more
power than we both deciding how we should digest information is "funny"...
well... you're alienated.

Don't editorialize the title, it's just not cool. If you want to expand why
you think it's funny, write a blog post or write a comment. I am sure we've
never heard how the MSM doesn't "get" the internet, how their business models
should change, how the hyper-local journalism is the future, etc... include a
Bill O'Reilly video and I am sure you can also get Digg's frontpage.

And I am sorry for my agressive behaviour. It's 7am and I drank a few beers.
Just don't editorialize the title, please.

~~~
TomOfTTB
I quote from the guidelines...

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial
spin on it, the editors may rewrite it. "

So you're just wrong on this. (For the record I did write a blog post on my
blog but I wanted to share the link and didn't feel my post's expansion of the
issue was as relevant as the initial article)

As far as it being funny I'm sorry but it is. Saying Google should be guilty
of copyright infringement for crawling a website is ridiculous. If someone
said it on Saturday Night Live it would get a huge laugh. Because it's comical

(For the record I'm not deaf to the MSM's issues and again posted my full
thoughts on the issue here: [http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Searching-For-A-
Solution-to...](http://www.tomstechblog.com/post/Searching-For-A-Solution-to-
The-Journalism-Squeeze.aspx))

~~~
inerte
Hey, I just want to apologize. While I still think your title is wrong (er...
it is a gratuitous editorial spin), when I woke up this morning I regretted
writing in that tone while drunk. Not something that I would do face-to-face,
I assure you... my bad.

