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Fifth Column
Ay Pee president: the flow of propaganda err information must be controlled, comrade.
2010-09-25


An enforcement mechanism needs to be created to help curb unlicensed use of news on the Internet, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley said Thursday.
Posted by:Beavis

#3  All this seems to have a pretty simple work around. Copy the article, put it all in Quotes and report it as news. For example, The Wash Post has released this in today's paper" bla bla bla". Now it is in itself news being reported on and should be covered.
Posted by: 49 Pan   2010-09-25 01:56  

#2  Lest we fergit, TOPIX/WORLD NEWS > GLOBAL INTERNET TREATY PROPOSED [by Council of Europe].

versus

DER SPEIGEL > INVESTIGATORS BELIEVE DEER [Reeves Mutjac] MURDERED RED PANDAS, in the Nuremberg
Zoo.

D *** NG IT, AMERICA = AMERIKA, THAT BAMBI IS REALLY A KILLER, A KILLER, I TELL YA, THANKS TO THE NET + CRAIGSLIST!
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2010-09-25 00:54  

#1  AyPee is just following the lead taken by Reuters in scanning websites in search of verbatim quoted articles and demanding licensing fees for use.

AyPee has also been pressing Congress to license facts it and its members report as means of stopping what they see as piracy, not necessarily copyright infringement. That means if a story by a member media outlet reports on, for example, a plane crash, then only associated members may use the facts of the event in their stories, anyone else may not because that content is licensed independent of copyright issues.

Sounds like a good idea on paper until the first time someone who is in the news demands a cut of the revenue of all media outlets. In a crime, the cop who arrests the bad guy, the bad guy's lawyer, even a court clerk could conceivably demand restitution for use of their names and likenesses, etcetera.

News stops being a public event and then becomes a rights orgy.

AyPees real problem is the dinosaur in the room. The internet has made barriers to news distribution so low anyone can do it. Except for crime news and political news, nearly every story generated and distributed by AyPee is institutionally generated; all the members do is rewrite the news. Do they license that content, too?

What do they do after they have set up an "enforcement" system and surviving bloggers really do decide to start writing original news. WTF do they do then? How do they recover the costs of investment in the "enforcement" mechanism, when another enforcement mechanism is turned back on them?

How do you explain to your investors, "Well, we didn't forsee this..."

How do you stop advertisers from going to specialized websites who do write their own news and then license it as they publish it? Is the AyPee gonna pony up the bucks?

Journalism has become diffused; the costs of gathering news has not changed very much, but the revenues generated by advertisers, the value-added services used to service those accounts, have dropped through the floor.


Journalism as a business is still very much in flux. The only positive for the news business is that the economy really hasn't recovered, yet. When it does, advertisers will start driving costs again to the floor as news outlet bid to retain business.

How do you explain to investors that your "enforcement" mechsnism won't even cover its own costs and you need something else?
Posted by: badanov   2010-09-25 00:34  

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