Jan 13th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
According to a piece at Wired, now that digital-rights management seems to be going the way of the dodo, some labels are thinking about watermarking as a replacement. The piece contains this not-totally-comforting comment about the current watermarking process:
“At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won’t do that… Sony’s and Universal’s DRM-free lineups contain ‘anonymous’ watermarks that won’t trace to an individual.”
So, there you have it. The industry could trace specific tracks to you, but they promise they won’t do that. Reassuring, isn’t it? I’m sure at one point Sony would have promised that it would never install a Trojan virus or back-door rootkit on your computer when you bought one of the company’s CDs too, and we know how that turned out.
I’m trying to imagine a world in which every piece of content was watermarked in some way. What would happen to mashups? How would it affect the principle of fair use? Would Internet service providers start to block specific activity on the Web based on whether a watermark was detected? And would the DMCA-driven “take it down first and ask questions later” policy extend to virtually every kind of content?
Just this afternoon I was listening to The Ongoing History of New Music on 102.1, and host Alan Cross was talking about the “Amen break” — a legendary drum riff that appeared in a song by The Winstons in 1969 and then started showing up in rap and hip-hop samples in the 1980s, and has since appeared in dozens of popular hits.
What would have happened if GC Coleman (the drummer) or Richard Spencer — the composer who holds the rights to the song, and is now a high-school social studies teacher — had a watermark on that sample? Would they have become rich, or would hip-hop have come up with a different sound? Would all the bands that used part of the track have been sued? Would anyone care? I wonder.
Sep 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
It’s funny how all those press releases that the record industry sends out about the costs of music piracy rarely ever mention “fair use,” a concept that is an integral component of copyright law in most countries. It’s as though the idea never existed. But then, admitting that copyright regulations are a tradeoff between two opposing forces — fair use and creative control — would get in the way of pushing the whole “downloading is theft” idea.
To counter some of those one-sided arguments, we now have a study from the Computer and Communications Industry Association that says fair use of copyrighted works generates $4.5-trillion in economic benefits. As Mike Masnick notes over at Techdirt, you could quibble with the methodology of the CCIA study, but it is no more one-sided than all the anti-piracy “facts” that get circulated by the record companies. Says CCIA president Ed Black:
“Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past 10 years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner.”
According to one measure used by the study — “value added,” or the difference between an industry’s costs and the gross economic output it generates — fair use has contributed substantially more to the U.S. economy than the copyright business has (although there are problems with this, as Nick Carr describes in his own inimitable style). The study itself is here.
As the Inquirer points out, the amount of value created by fair use may even be higher than the CCIA study estimates, since much of the economic value that is generated by the music industry is driven by publicity and media reports — both of which would either not exist, or wouldn’t be as powerful, without fair use. Not surprisingly, Google has a pro fair-use post on its public policy blog.
Feb 13th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 10 Comments
I confess that I still don’t get the whole Belgium vs. Google thing. I keep reading about it and reading about it, and thinking about it — hoping that I have somehow missed a crucial point or argument in the newspapers’ position that makes this whole thing sensible in any way. But by now I am totally convinced: It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It is just dumb, with a capital D.
As Danny Sullivan notes in his overview of the case, this complaint from the Belgian group known as Copiepresse dates back almost a year. After the first complaint — as is customary in these types of cases, when sites don’t want to be included in Google’s index — the search engine advised the agency (as Google notes here) to use the well-known “robots.txt” file to exclude parts of its websites from Google’s spider-bots. Copiepress apparently said that this process, which takes about 10 minutes, was unacceptable.
So after a year of legal wrangling, and millions of dollars in legal costs, the Belgian group has “won” and has forced Google to remove its newspaper content. In other words, it has prevented the world’s largest and most respected search engine from showing links to that content to people who want that content — and doing so for free. And the claim that Google makes money from this content, which others have argued in the past, is just as stupid, since Google News doesn’t carry advertisements on its content pages.
Carlo at Techdirt shares my feelings on this matter, and I know many other journalists who do as well. Some companies would kill for the kind of profile and access that being linked in Google News provides to potential readers. Someone at Copiepresse clearly sees this as some kind of noble battle against a U.S. tech giant, but all they are really doing is harming themselves. Oh yes, and looking stupid. Did I mention that part?
Update:
Tim O’Reilly says over here that he supports the publishers — who complain that Google’s “cached” links provide access to their archived content (for which they charge). But as a commenter notes, there is already an established way to let Google crawl your pages without caching, called the “noarchive” tag. I also fail to see why Tim supports Google’s use of “snippets” for book search, but doesn’t support the same thing for news search.
Dec 15th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | 2 Comments
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.”
Nov 7th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The Society of Editors got together in Glasgow for their annual conference, and at least one senior editor demonstrated that he doesn’t have a clue what side of the bread his butter is on. Andrew Neil, CEO of Press Holdings Group and former Sunday Times editor, reportedly gave a rousing speech in which the dour Scot talked about how record companies and movie companies were getting their pound of flesh from Google for copyright violations, and newspapers should be talking tough and demanding the same:
We don’t charge them a penny for our hard-earned journalism… It’s time for a conversation with Google. They can afford it. Google has its pockets stashed with money - some of it we have earned.
As more than one commenter on Roy Greenslade’s blog at The Guardian noted, this is pure bollocks. Newspaper executives like Neil — and the editors of newspapers in Belgium, who have sued to have their links removed from Google News, and editors from the World Newspaper Association — talk about how Google is “stealing” their content and making money from it, all the while ignoring several crucial points:
- Google doesn’t sell ads on the Google News page, so it makes no money from those links, therefore talking about how rich Google is becomes totally irrelevant.
- Google only gives a short snippet of the text from a newspaper’s website, which is permitted by “fair use” provisions of copyright law, and provides a link to the site.
- Providing all those links helps push traffic to those sites. In other words, Google is doing newspapers a favour.
Nevertheless, editors such as Neil continue to want to either extort money from Google on the pretext that the company is “stealing” their content, or force it to remove links to them (as AFP did) and thereby cut off their nose to spite their face (Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism blog has a post along the same lines). Smart. Any wonder newspapers aren’t doing well?
