AP: The News Gatekeeper is Dead! Long Live The News Gatekeeper!

Ramblings

from the let's-try-this-again... dept

The CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, gave a speech yesterday to a group of news executives supposedly calling on them to drop their antiquated ways, learn to embrace the new opportunities of the internet and, most importantly, ditch the mindset of being the gatekeepers of the news. At least, that’s what the Associated Press’s own writeup on his speech suggests. It’s powerful stuff, but it seems a little odd. After all, isn’t this the same Associate Press that less than a month ago sued Moreover for linking to AP articles? Isn’t this the same Associated Press that pressured Google to pay for the same thing? That doesn’t sound like an organization that’s trying to stop being a gatekeeper and embracing the new opportunities of the internet. It sounds like the opposite.

So, let’s go to the details. Thankfully, the AP also published the full text of Curley’s speech so we can dig into the details a bit. While the AP reporter’s coverage of his speech definitely does capture the gist of it, it leaves out some of the key (and somewhat contradictory) details. So, while Curley says: “Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people?s 24-hour news needs. That’s a huge shift from the we-know-best, gatekeeper thinking” his own plan doesn’t seem to agree with that. He later says: “we’re coupling those initiatives with strong new efforts to protect news web sites from unauthorized scraping through tighter site protocols and content tagging.” Sorry, but it’s those protections against scraping that is part of the gatekeeper thinking. He also says: “Enforcement, too, must be a part. What we do comes at great cost and sacrifice, even death. We believe content should have wide distribution. We intend to be compensated for it.” and “We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power….” In other words, we’re going to restrict access to what we do in order to create artificial scarcity in order to charge for it. Restricting access is what might also be called gatekeeping. It seems like Curley’s big wake up call to newspaper execs is really “say goodbye to the old gatekeeper, and say hello to the new gatekeeper.”

There are plenty of business models that make sense for the Associated Press, but it’s pretty amusing for the CEO of that organization to call for getting rid of the old way of thinking and then outline what’s basically the same old thinking.

Filed Under: business models, gatekeeper, newspapers
Companies: associated press

Oregon Attorney General And University Of Oregon Tell The RIAA They're Not Its Free Investigators

Legal Issues

from the can't-just-push-around-students dept

Earlier this year, the RIAA began to focus many of its file sharing lawsuits on college students. The RIAA incorrectly referred to it as an education campaign, when it might more accurately be described as pissing off the very people the RIAA needs to support any future business model (oops, too late for that). While the RIAA tried to force universities to just hand over the names of those it accused of file sharing, it was nice to see at least a few universities fight back. In most cases, this mean telling the RIAA to shove off, as it wasn’t the university’s job to help serve legal complaints. Eventually though, when subpoenas came through, most universities would hand over the info. However, it looks like the University of Oregon is taking a stand. Together with the Attorney General of Oregon, they’ve actually filed a motion to quash the RIAA’s attempt to identify students at the school. In other words, they’re not just refusing to pass on the info, they’re actively pushing back against the RIAA’s lawsuit.

Specifically, the Attorney General points out that with just IP addresses, it’s basically impossible to identify the students that the RIAA is asking the university to hand over: “Plaintiffs’ subpoena is unduly burdensome and overbroad. It seeks information that the university does not readily possess.” In order for the university to figure out who was associated with those IPs, it would involve a level of investigation that isn’t required (and shouldn’t be required) under law. In other words, the university isn’t there to be the free investigative arm of the RIAA. It doesn’t get to just throw some weak evidence over the wall and tell the university to figure out who’s responsible. Either it comes up with a better way to find the information itself, or it should stop filing these lawsuits. It should be interesting to see if this works… and if other universities follow suit.

Filed Under: colleges, copyright, file sharing, lawsuits, music, oregon, students
Companies: riaa, university of oregon

Videos Demonstrate The Complexities Of Fair Use

Culture

from the human-judgment-required dept

On Thursday, Mike noted EFF's Fair Use Principles for User Generated Video Content. I wanted to highlight the "test suite" of fair-use videos they released in concert with those principles. It's a a gallery of videos that EFF thinks constitute fair use of copyrighted works. It includes a number of golden oldies that made the rounds in recent years, including "Ten Things I Hate About Commandments", a video featuring that ridiculous Nixon Peabody song, and a video about fair use constructed by splicing together short Disney Cartoon clips. It's worth noting that the law is far from settled in this area, so it's far from certain that the courts would find all of these videos to be fair use under copyright law. But in a sense, that's the point: deciding what constitutes fair use requires the exercise of human judgment. The four factors determining fair use include subjective factors like "the effect of the use upon the potential market" and "the purpose and character of the use" that simply can't be determined by an automated algorithm.

Filed Under: copyright, eff, fair use

Wikipedia Not Liable For Defamation In France

Legal Issues

from the hurray-for-safe-harbors dept

We’re big believers in the importance of various “safe harbors” that protect online service providers from being responsible for the activities or content of their users. After all, it seems unfair to blame the telephone company if a telephone is used in a crime. However, some people have trouble with that concept — and some countries don’t have the same sort of clear cut safe harbor provisions written into law that the US offers. For example, it seemed pretty ridiculous that France declared Yahoo (yes, the company) and its then CEO war criminals half a decade ago, just because some users had auctioned Nazi memorabilia. After realizing how ridiculous this was, French courts later reversed that ruling — and now perhaps they recognize the importance of these kinds of safe harbors. Apparently, they even changed the law in 2004 to protect sites from being liable for certain actions of its users — and that law has been now used to clear Wikipedia of any wrongdoing, after the company behind Wikipedia was sued by three people who were upset about how others had written about them in a Wikipedia article. The court noted that the allegedly defamatory references had been removed and that Wikipedia shouldn’t be responsible for that content anyway: “Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature.” Nice to see these kinds of safe harbors getting more widespread acceptance.

Filed Under: defamation, france, safe harbors, wikipedia

The New York Times Finally Gets The Web

Surprises

from the it's-about-time dept

Techdirt has beat up on the New York Times a lot over the years for its bone-headed use of the web. For years, it treated the website as an afterthought, serving up warmed-over versions of its print coverage and charging for the privilege. As we pointed out repeatedly, the web is different from older media. Success online requires that you be part of the conversation. Users expect a faster-paced, more connected experience from a website than you get from a newspaper. But in the last six months or so, the Times has made a series of decisions that suggests they're finally starting to understand that the web is its own medium with its own unique rules. They've dropped their paywall, launched a ton of great blogs, produced podcasts and videos, and added new personalization features. This summer, they unveiled Open, a blog by and for geeks about the use of open source technologies at the Times. And now they've launched Blogrunner, a news aggregator they snapped up last year and are integrated in various places around the site, starting with the technology section. Integrating links to other sites into their subject-specific pages makes it more likely that people will make that page their starting point for information on that subject. None of these developments are that Earthshaking by themselves, but when you add them all up it starts to look like the Grey Lady is finally taking the web seriously. Now if we can just get them to give us full-text RSS feeds of their blogs!

Filed Under: business models, newspapers, open source, websites
Companies: ny times

Yahoo Exec Didn't 'Lie' To Congress… Was Just Uninformed

News You Could Do Without

from the that's-my-story-and-I'm-sticking-to-it... dept

A couple weeks back, Congress asked Yahoo’s general counsel Michael Callahan to stop by and chat about his earlier testimony, noting that he’d told Congress that Yahoo had no information on how China was able to track down and jail journalist Shi Tao even though documents released this summer showed that Yahoo actually was involved. Yahoo’s response to Congress was that the implication was “grossly unfair and mischaracterizes the nature and intent of our past testimony.” Of course, that didn’t explain the two factual bits of information: (1) Callahan said Yahoo had no idea what happened (2) documents showed otherwise. Given the two weeks to figure out how that mischaracterized the nature and intent of the testimony the best Callahan could come up with is to plead ignorance. He’s now apologizing and saying he was ill-informed when he last appeared before Congress. That could be true, but in his new statement, Callahan admits that he realized he had misinformed Congress a few months after his original appearance, and chose not to inform them (which he regrets). However, if that’s the case, why did it take him two weeks to say that publicly after first lashing out at Congress for pointing out his clearly incorrect earlier statements?

Filed Under: china, congress
Companies: yahoo

Does No One Remember The Friendster Fakester Fiasco? Facebook Now Dealing With Fakebookers

Overhype

from the been-there,-done-that dept

Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it, right? There’s been a bunch of buzz in the blogworld over Facebook’s decision to kick out a user who went by the pseudonym Jon Swift. The complaint from Facebook was that impersonating someone or not using a real first and last name was against the terms of service. Of course, there are many such fake profiles in Facebook and the faux-Swift argued that if people knew you by the fake name there seemed to be no reason to keep that person out. Following an outcry from Facebook users, the company relented and let Swift back into Facebook, saying that since he’s known by that name, it was okay.

What’s amazing, though, is how (as far as I can see) none of the folks commenting on this story compares it to the nearly identical situation that happened with Friendster back at the height of its popularity. Lots of people had started creating fake Friendster profiles and the company just started deleting them as fast as possible. It pissed off a bunch of users, and some people felt that this was the turning point for Friendster. It was the point that people began to realize that this fun community they were involved in had separate rules that they didn’t all agree with, and it led many people to go searching for more open social networks. Given that history, it’s surprising that Facebook took the same humorless position on it — but perhaps the kids at Facebook weren’t around during the Friendster days, so they’re doomed to repeat its history…

Filed Under: fakesters
Companies: facebook, friendster

Yet Another Newspaper Paywall Dropped

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the not-too-many-left dept

Newspaper paywalls keep coming down. Just a month and a half after the NY Times dropped its paywall for TimesSelect, the Sacramento Bee is freeing its Capitol Alert service. This was actually a more interesting experiment. Launched in January of this year, it wasn’t (like most paywalls) about taking content from the newspaper and hiding it behind walls, but creating a separate new service for political insiders. It was pricey, but the idea is that it would be worth it for folks like lobbying firms as it would be information that wasn’t available elsewhere. Apparently, though, not enough people really were interested in paying — especially compared to the prospect of increasing online ad revenues. So, Capitol Alert is ditching the paywall and going ad supported as of next week.

Filed Under: business models, newspapers, paywall
Companies: sacramento bee

EA Boss Recognizes The Economic Trends Of Infinite Goods

Say That Again

from the don't-hear-that-every-day dept

At this point, we’re so used to execs from big entertainment firms denying the existence of the inevitable trends impacting their industry, that it’s truly a surprise when someone appears to clearly understand what’s happening. Slashdot points us to the shocking news that EA’s CEO knows that the business model for his industry is changing, and that the current one is becoming obsolete:

“In the next five years, we’re all going to have to deal with this. In China, they’re giving games away for free. People who benefit from the current model will need to embrace a new revenue model, or wait for others to disrupt.”

Can you imagine hearing the same thing from the head of a movie studio or record label? It’s nice to finally see a CEO who recognizes the economics at hand — even if it means his former cash cow will be obsolete and his company will need to embrace entirely new business models.

Filed Under: business model, economics, free, infinite goods, video games
Companies: ea