March 18, 2009
NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE
From Edge:
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry's popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry's work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it. One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of "When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem." I think about that conversation a lot these days.
The problem newspapers face isn't that they didn't see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:38 AM | Permalink



















Comments
Things must be bad. They are literally giving away copies of the NYTimes on my campus. A few students will take a free copy...
Posted by: J. Hawkins | Mar 19, 2009 10:31:11 AM
Basically, this is all about money. In Europe and elsewhere there exists a solution that no American could ever dream of: the TV license - a regular mandatory payment by citizens to an independant public broadcasting authority, such as the BBC in Britain, which is renowned for the quality of its news-gathering and cultural programming. The same principle could be extended to support a number of news services to replace the printed newspapers. Because the license money can't be plundered by politicians, the BBC is far less beholden to the government than commercially financed TV/media companies are beholden to advertisers. With people downloading and consuming so much news by wifi etc, its only fair that they be required to pay for it.
Posted by: aguy109 | Mar 19, 2009 10:56:47 AM
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