By Below is a comment left by JoeC on my postings with tips to creating a successful blog and I think what he says is worthy of a blog posting all in itself. Here is what Joe had to say about the changes he sees coming to blogging:
I was considering expanding on something I suggested in a comment to an earlier topic by writing an article in the Forums sections, but I guess this would be a good place to do it.
In my earlier comment, I mentioned that change would be coming to the world of blogging in the near future. Let me narrow that down to sometime next year.
Those of you who read Stars and Stripes may have noticed they have a section they title AP News. A month ago, I notice that if you scroll down to the bottom of any one of those articles, you will see a link that says “Click here for copyright permissions!” in small print. That brings up a page with several options for the reuse of AP copyrighted content. One of the listed options is POST, which it describes as, “Post all or part of this article on a web site, intranet, or blog.” That link brings up a page with three options:
Post Full Article
Embed this entire article on your web site, intranet, or blog.
• Free (includes ads)
OR
• Per-month or per-page view charge (no ads)Post Excerpt
Embed an excerpt of this article on your web site, intranet, or blog.
• Charge based on words; total cost from $12.50 to $100.00 (no ads)Post PDF of Full Article
PDF of full article you host on your web site, intranet, or blog.
• Per-month charge (no ads)If you go back to the Stars and Stripes AP News articles, it appears that they may be using the free-with-AP-ads option, as the articles appear to be accompanied with AP specific ads. However, it is obvious that most bloggers who excerpt content don’t do that.
The .ICopyright agency that presents the licensing options appears to be independent of, but contracted by AP News. Part of their site cites the topic on which there is still much ambiguity; the fair uses exemption. The fair uses link tells you how it is defined in copyright law – like I said, very ambiguous, but something I believe will have to be hashed out with the changes I see coming. From what I understand, besides the four criteria listed, a big cleaver in deciding fair use or not is if the excerpted material is used in a for-profit vs. non-profit publication. Hence, a blog site that obtains revenue from Google Ads and such may be considered a for-profit publication.
All well and good, but why haven’t you heard much commotion about this yet. I think the signs have been appearing for some time, but they haven’t come to a head yet. Many newspapers are in economic trouble and have been threatening to put their foot down and insist on being paid when others reuse their content. AP seems to be taking specific technological steps to do just that. On the AP website, there is a link to “Associated Press to build news registry to protect content.”
Registry will provide tools to monitor use of AP and member content online while also enabling new business opportunities
. . .
The registry will initially cover all AP text content online, and be extended to AP member content in early 2010. Eventually, it will be expanded to cover photos and video as well. AP will fund development and operation of the registry through 2010, until it becomes self-sustaining.
These initial tools may just provide a means for AP to ensure compliance of those with temporary licenses to use AP content, but it is almost definitely a first step to coming down on those who ignore licensing requirements all together. Think of a mash-up of the anti-plagiarism software used at universities and Google’s search engine scouring the Web looking for blocks of text. And all other content producers will not be far behind.
So the message to bloggers whose content is made up, in part, of cut-and-pastes from news publications; start doing more original research, analysis, and exposition, or be prepared to pay up.
As a person with an academic interest in the evolution of information technology and media, this stuff is fascinating to me. I intend to follow it closely. I might even decide to blog on it
.
Interesting stuff and really something that shouldn’t be too surprising considering how more and more newspapers are going bankrupt. Due to the copyright issues that is why I do not copy and paste and entire article when I copy and paste excerpts, I always leave the name of source at the link. If it is an especially good article I will also leave the author’s name and encourage readers to read the full article. I like to think that I actually bring more readers to the sources I excerpt from on the ROK Drop.
If news agencies are going to charge for excerpts there is no way I would pay to excerpt on the site. What I foresee people doing is plagarizing from sites and slightly modifying the content in order to not attract attention from news sites looking for plagarizing. I just do not see how such a policy would work. If a news source wanted to have a small text ad at the bottom of the excerpt next to their link, I think this is a good compromise .
So does anyone else have any good ideas in regards to the copyright issues in order to strike a good balance between content providers and bloggers?
3:21 am on August 28th, 2009 1
I, too, don't post entire articles, but merely excerpts, and I think I do it well enough to cause readers to click through to the original article. If they started charging for excepts, I wouldn't pay and would merely start paraphrasing. Or, perhaps I'd switch format and provide more "original" content, insofar as that's possible. But where does that leave people like Korea Beat, or occassionally me and The Marmot's Hole, who provide translations of Korean-language articles? If a blog posts an entire article, but one translated into English, is that also a violation?
One of the big criticisms of blogs and bloggers is that they haven't established their own sources and rely too much, if not exclusively, on what the mainstream media does. That's a valid criticism in part, and I try to mix it up with a variety of posts and formats. But, I say this without trying to be too pompous, I think some bloggers here do a good service by commenting on the media and what the media's doing: shoddy journalism, quotation fabrication, or negative portrayals of teachers, service(wo)men, etc.
As far as good ideas, according to your last paragraph, I'm not sure I have any right now. Perhaps it would be a good idea to allow bloggers to, say, excerpt 25% of an article provided they attribute the source. Bloggers who selectively excerpt now are helping, not hurting, readership of the online newspapers, and bloggers who can fit together various sources and also add commentary are doing a service to mainstream media by bringing it readers it otherwise might not have.
But where does that leave us in a place like Korea, where copyright comes to die? Korea Beat frequently posts examples of the Chosun Ilbo website taking screenshots of foreign webpages and presenting these pictures as their own, as a way to avoid paying whatever fees are required. And it's common practice in local papers to give rundowns of what foreign media is saying about a particular Korean issue.
Maybe somebody else can shed some light on this, but in Korea it's also common to quote online messageboard users as sources. The Korea Times, for instance, will quote from Dave's ESL Cafe on teacher issues, and Korean-language sources do it all the time. I myself have a weekly thing in the Joongang Ilbo where I compile some of my reader comments into a column. Do these mainstream media sources have permission to quote extensively from online forums?
5:33 am on August 28th, 2009 2
This will never work.
My guess is that it is designed in part to go after big time bloggers and commentary sites who routinely rip the press apart. I doubt it is just a misguided attempt to generate revenue.
It's vaguely like Joe the Plummer — the guy finds a microphone stuck before him and has a chance to speak his voice — the media is horrified at how it turned out – solely based on their own political leanings – so they try to destroy the guy in the public's mind.
Sites like Newsbusters (or for that matter Media Matters) use quotes from the media everyday, all day to point to what they see as gross violations of neutrality in the media – and to attack liberals (or conservatives) caught in the public eye. Increasingly, print and TV journalism and opinion outlets have one or more blogs of their own where they site people.
Overall, blogging has allowed more people and orgs to speak their mind when it comes to politics and anything else. One result of this has been the news media image taking a vicious beating each and every week. Before, if you wanted to get a full flavor of press bias, you'd have to read several different big time outlets yourself. Now, you don't. If one of them prints or puts on air something obviously bias, it flies around the Internet at lightspeed.
These coming rules are meant to take a bite out of that just like the move toward renewing the Fairness Doctrine is meant to take a bite out of talk radio.
Maybe it will generate an insignificant amount of revenue when some of the more popular blogs and commentary sites agree to pay to quote them, but the average person won't pay. They'll quote anyway and count on not being sued. Or if the media finds a way to block exerting without paying, they'll go to paraphrasing…
The charging for quoting is really ridiculous when you see that they don't charge random viewers for the full content anyway.
The only choice for the media to try to return to the good ole days when they could dominate access to information is to require people to pay a monthly or yearly user fee for all or nearly all of their current content.
But that won't really work. The society's view of the value of the "nonpartisan" news media keeps sinking lower and lower. People are not going to pay to read these outlets online. It would be interesting to see if they could generate as much revenue with a user fee system vs ad revenue they currently generate.
If they attempt to charge for quoting them on the common blogs, their ad revenue will plummet, because they will destroy the best advertisement they have for their own website — people quoting and linking to them…
12:59 pm on August 28th, 2009 3
BoingBoing discussed this in June, 2008.
http://boingboing.net/2008/06/17/associated-press…
Cory Doctorow gets pretty excited about this stuff, but he's not exactly wrong:
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.