Newspaper chain goes Creative Commons
From Jay Rosen’s excellent PressThink site comes word that a chain of daily and weekly newspapers in the U.S. called GateHouse is rolling out Creative Commons licensing for all of its papers:
Over the weekend, the Watertown TAB of Watertown, Massachusetts, revamped its website. The result is, for now, strikingly bloglike: a wide center column with items in reverse chronological order. And at the very bottom, a small silver badge with a line of text that reads: “Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license.”
GateHouse owns 75 daily and 231 weekly newspapers, and so far “the CC license now covers 96 of the company’s TownOnline sites, which are grouped within a portal for their many Eastern Massachusetts newspapers,” the PressThink piece says. The chain’s reasoning is seen as “a response to the cut-and-paste world of weblogs, which frequently quote and point to newspaper stories. Making it easier — and legal — for bloggers to quote stories at length means that bloggers are pointing their audience at the newspaper.”
The TownOnline and WickedLocal online networks or hubs of newspaper websites that GateHouse now has, the piece says, have been redesigned and will include “user-generated content.”
Related posts:
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 6:21 pm)
If it had been me, the lesson I would have taken from the observation that bloggers like to cut-and-paste is that they don’t care whether it’s legal or not to do so. Haven’t heard of a lawsuit yet. And of course this dodges the fact that many blogs generate revenue off of advertising. Is that “non-commercial” use?
(On Dec 15th, 2006 at 8:01 pm)
That’s a good question, Rob. I’m not sure the CC license is really necessary, since bloggers cut and paste willy-nilly anyway — and since running AdSense presumably breaches the criteria of the CC.