Want to know when a bit of news has really hit the mainstream? It's when the Taiwanese company Next Media Animation does a computer generated animation of the story. These videos have become a media sensation. Guess what they just took on? Yup, the battle over SOPA, which they animate by showing Hollywood lobbyists seeking to attack the internet, and showing not only how tech companies teamed up to fight this, but that internet users are pushing back. Amusingly, they make use of the imagery from the UC Davis pepper spray incident to show how Hollywood and the government can "knock out" sites under SOPA.

Every time the Associated Press does something concerning the internet, it seems to just reinforce how out of touch it is. The latest is the bizarre and ridiculous decision to scold AP reporters for daring to tweet out the "news" that they had been arrested. You see, in the minds of AP bosses, they haven't quite figured out that artificial scarcity isn't a the same thing as real scarcity. So they think that if a reporter is arrested, the reporter should keep that news hoarded up until the AP itself can release it. But, as anyone who is a frequent Twitter user knows, that's crazy in a situation like this. Reporter gets arrested, reporter tweets about it. That's a perfectly reasonable response. But the AP wanted the story for "itself."

The problem is that the AP is apparently dreadful at chess. It doesn't think beyond the single move ahead. So, yes, perhaps they don't get the "break" on the news that an AP reporter was arrested -- that goes on Twitter. But is it really that bad? Let's just play out the scenario. Assume the story goes viral on Twitter. Remember, this is 140 characters, not a full blown article. If the message goes viral, then tons more people are seeing that short message and are curious about the details -- the details that aren't going to show up on Twitter anyway. But having that tweet out there, so it can go viral, means building interest in the story, and from that, it seems like any story would end up receiving more traffic, because the Twitter messages "primed the pump." I honestly can't fathom a scenario in which people see the tweets and decide that it acts as a full replacement for the eventual news article.

Mathew Ingram makes a key point on all of this. If a single 140-character tweet is acting as a suitable replacement for your reporting... you've got bigger problems:

The other thing the Associated Press needs to think about is that if a 140-character post or two by one of your reporters on Twitter is a threat to your news service, then you have a problem that can’t be fixed by simply enforcing your social-media policies more stringently. This argument feels very similar to the debates that newspapers used to have when they first put up websites — about whether to post breaking news to their site, or “save” it for the paper. This was fundamentally a lose-lose situation, as most newspapers discovered, since saving it often involved others breaking the news first on their websites.

Nikki Finke, the infamous editor of Deadline.com is apparently suing the Hollywood Reporter for copyright infringement... because it wrote stories on the same news events as Deadline.com. Seriously. Here's Finke's quote:

"PMC (the company that owns Deadline.com) is taking a stand against desperate and copycat news organizations and media outlets such as THR that constantly monitor PMC’s websites for the sole purpose of copying and imitating PMC websites’ news stories and original content within minutes after online publication. These copycat media outlets such as THR, rather than conducting their own independent reporting and investigation, developing their own sources and insiders, and generating their own leads and stories, simply steal PMC’s content and pawn it off as their own. In truth, THR, faced with the harsh reality that it had become a second-rate entertainment industry news source unable to attract insiders’ attention anymore."

THR, for its part, claims the whole thing is ridiculous, and many of the stories mentioned were on both sites because Hollywood publicists sent the same info to both sites:

"An initial review of the complaint shows that it is replete with examples of stories that originated from widely-released press releases from publicists, or widespread confirmations from publicists to numerous outlets, including both The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline.com. It is not copyright infringement to report these stories, even if on occasion Deadline.com posts them first."

While I don't always agree with THR's coverage, on this one, I'm on their side. Reporting on the same story -- even if you find out about it from the other site -- is not copyright infringement. It's often how news works. Someone should explain to Finke the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law, as well as the important tidbit of information that you can't own facts, and others are free to write about the same facts.

This is just a bit bizarre. As the NY Times and others keep moving towards a paywall, it and the Washington Post and Gannett have apparently funded a bizarrely pointless operation called OnGo, which appears to be an excessively limited, high priced, walled garden aggregator. For a mere $7 per month, you can get access to content from those three companies along with a few other big newspapers. Of course, there are limits. You only get the top 20 stories from the NY Times, for example.

Or, you know, you could just use an RSS reader. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. And not pay the monthly fee.

I'm reading through the various details and stories on this project, and the one question I keep asking which isn't answered anywhere is what is the additional value this brings to the table. When the very best that the operation's boss man can do to explain his value proposition is to say "this is another option," you're in trouble. This isn't providing any more value for the (much higher) price. It seems to be targeted at fools, which is no way to build a business these days.

Last summer, you may recall, we wrote about the ridiculous situation of a company called "Gooseberry Natural Resources LLC," which held a ridiculous broad patent (6,370,535) that it claimed covered the basic concept of generating a press release online. The company had sued a bunch of (usually small) online press release services -- some of whom were really struggling to fight the lawsuit. And, to make matters worse, it was not clear who really owned the patent, as there appeared to be a series of shell companies to hide the actual patent holder.

Apparently whoever is behind Gooseberry got tired of simply trying to demand cash from mom-and-pop press release services, and has now decided to sue a bunch of online services, Digg, Reddit, Fark, TechCrunch, and others. What do any of those companies have to do with generating press releases online? You've got me. Of course, some of those sites are pretty good at teaming up and doing good deeds. So, perhaps the Reddit crew might be able to figure out who really holds this patent?

The whole thing looks pretty ridiculous. For example, this is the section on how it claims Reddit violates the patent:

Plaintiff is informed and believes that Advance owns, operates, advertises, controls, sells, and otherwise provides hardware, software and websites for "news and press release services" including via the reddit.com website ("the Advance system", available at www.reddit.com). Upon information and belief, Advance has infringed and continues to infringe one or more claims of the '535 patent by making, using, providing, offering to sell, and selling (directly or through intermediaries), in this district and elsewhere in the United States, systems and methods for entering and providing structured news and press releases. More particularly, Plaintiff is informed and believes that Advance has and/or require and/or directs users to access and/or interact with a system that receives and stores separately specified portions of a new or press release and that assembles a news or press release in a predetermined format.

This is basically the same basic language used against all the sites sued. It's basically a ridiculous attack on lots of well-known tech blogs and news aggregator sites, claiming they somehow infringe on this ridiculous patent. I find it especially amusing that they've included Slashdot in this attack, seeing as Slashdot's system (which really hasn't changed that much over the years) predates the patent filing by a few years. Seems like the prior art on this one is likely to be pretty strong. Of course, fighting a patent infringement lawsuit, no matter how bogus, can be quite expensive. Hopefully these sites are willing to team up and pool resources. Thankfully, most of the sites involved are owned by much larger companies who can (and hopefully will) fight this.

Remember the Associated Press's bizarre and unworkable idea to DRM the news. Well, reader crcb alerts us to the news that the AP is now filling in more details, about how it effectively wants to become the ASCAP of news. Yeah, you read that right. Talk about bad ideas. I'm sure being like ASCAP is appealing from the AP's side, but it makes no sense at all from the publisher side -- especially given the details where the AP gets to keep a 20% cut of any revenue collected this way. As you read through the details, it's as if the folks behind it at the AP don't quite understand the very basic economics of content and the internet:

Curley indicated that the clearinghouse's biggest moneymaking opportunity is likely to be the licensing of copyright-protected content to mobile phones and an array of computer tablets such as Apple Inc.'s iPad and emerging competitors.

Huh? You license content to website or apps, not to platforms... This seems to have absolute disaster written all over it.

There's been this a lot of talk about "aggregators" recently -- often in the context of traditional newspapers claiming that such aggregators are somehow damaging their business. As we've discussed in the past, if you look at the details, there's little evidence that aggregators are really the issue. Instead, many of the complaints appear to be confusing a correlation of their own business declines with the rise of aggregators, and falsely believing there's a causal relationship when there's little, if any, evidence to support that.

However, that's not going to stop ongoing legal actions from those publishers against the aggregators they believe are a problem. One reason for this is that the specific legal situation at times can be a bit vague, as internet aggregators are quite different than past businesses. If you're interested in this subject, you should absolutely read Kimberly Isbell's very thorough look at the legal issues related to online aggregators. She very carefully breaks out the different types of aggregators (though, I'm a bit surprised that people seriously consider commentary blogs to be "aggregators") as well as the specific legal issues facing each of the different aggregators. The problem, which becomes clear, is that the law is not anywhere close to settled on the key issues, and leave an awful lot of key questions up to the interpretation of whatever judge gets the cases in question. We've discussed in the past the idea that it's often possible to take the "fair use" factors and interpret them in either direction (something is or is not fair use), and the same may be true with "hot news" in some cases as well. That's a problem, and makes both concepts somewhat useless and dangerous as well. If you have a law where the boundaries are incredibly vague, unclear, and up to the whims of a randomly selected judge, it leads to potentially damaging situations, where people avoid liability by not even trying to do certain things for fear of getting sued.

The concept of hot news is now being tested in a few different courts, so we can be hopeful that within a few years, perhaps, the courts will dump the concept entirely as a violation of the First Amendment (an analysis that hasn't been done yet), but with that question still up in the air, there's still a chance that a confused court could rule otherwise, creating a massively damaging situation for value added content services online.

We recently wrote about the LA Times being barred by a judge from publishing a photo of murder suspect Alberd Tersargyan that was taken -- with permission -- in the courtroom. As pretty much every legal expert who commented on the case noted, there was almost no way the judge's ban would hold up under a First Amendment review, as it was clear prior restraint. And, indeed, it didn't take long for an appeals court to overturn the ruling and note that it was, indeed, prior restraint. The First Amendment wins again...

As Righthaven continues to file lawsuits, it seems that various lawyers who are concerned about copyright, free speech and chilling effects online have been rushing to help defend some of those sued. I can't recall a situation (even with US Copyright Group) where lawyers have been so eager to take on a company filing copyright infringement claims. Of course, the really interesting part is how some of the lawyers are testing out a variety of defenses to the lawsuits, some which seem to have a much better chance of passing judicial muster than others.

For example, some are claiming that Righthaven has no standing to sue, since it waits until after it's found the infringement to "buy" the copyright to the article in question from Stephens Media/Las Vegas Review-Journal. Others have argued that the lack of any actual damages should get the lawsuits dismissed. Still others have challenged the jurisdiction.

One interesting argument, based on an earlier ruling on the legality of Google's cache, makes the reposting of these articles "fair use." Unfortunately, the fact pattern in that case does appear to be a bit different. It not only involved a guy suing over the Google cache, but that guy also first requested that Google scan his pages, then made the request to visit the cache himself. Still, in that case, Google argued that without a robots.txt blocking them from caching the article, the guy had given implicit permission:

"Even if Google could be viewed as having made or distributed these copies of Field's works, Field impliedly granted Google permission to do so. Field displayed his site on the Internet without including any label, including those that are industry standard, to instruct Google not to present 'cached' links to the pages containing his works," Google attorneys argued.

And, in that case, the judge agreed. So, with Righthaven, these lawyers are claiming the same basic thing. They're saying that the LVRJ gave an implicit license for a similar cache-with-link by putting the content up for free and by failing to limit the ability to copy & paste the text via technical means. On top of that, they point out that the LVRJ explicitly encourages people to "share" the articles on its site (something the LVRJ still does -- including quick links to share it with 19 different services).

This does raise some tricky issues. If Google's cache is, in fact, legal and not infringement, then how is just reposting a story with a link back infringing? But, if reposting a story is found to be fair use, you're about to hear a collective gasp of horror from some online content producers who don't want people copying their stuff. Because of that general conflict, I'm beginning to wonder if some of the Righthaven lawsuits are about to become a lot more important than we initially expected -- and whether or not Google might have a very strong interest in supporting some of the cases against Righthaven.

We've talked about the public's desire for more real fact checking, as opposed to he-said/she-said style news reporting. And we've mentioned various programs that have brought crowdsourcing into the fact-checking game. And, now a USC journalism professor has put this all together to create a fact-checking wiki-based site, appropriately called WikiFactCheck.

Digging down to facts tends to be what crowdsourcing is good at. The problem, of course, is that there often are some blurry lines around what is actually a "fact" and what is not. But, given the (some would say excessive) cultural focus at Wikipedia on forcing a "neutral point of view," I could see how a similar group of people could somewhat vehemently focus in on specific facts that can be proven true or false, rather than getting too bogged down in opinion vs. facts debates.