Paul Gutmann on Vista Content Protection

That’s an excellent idea. Here’s Copiepresse’s position:

“Margaret Boribon, secretary-general of Copiepresse, told Reuters she was pleased with Tuesday’s judgement…

“She added that Copiepresse would still consider allowing Google to display extracts from the Belgian newspapers for a fee, although said it was up to Google to initiate contact.”

—Reuters

In other words, Copiepresse would like Google to pay for the privilege of providing them with free advertising. They have correctly deduced that Google needs content providers to exist; however, Google will continue to do business happily without a handful of publishers, while the publishers stand to lose a lot of traffic. For this stunt to actually stand a chance of hurting Google, they would need to pull a coup.

I recently read about a remarkably similar example of content providers trying to exploit content promoters—although the article doesn’t cite any sources, and I haven’t been able to find independent verification:

“Here’s an illustrative story about what can happen when the content-industry tail tries to wag the dog. About 10-15 years ago, music companies told a bunch of NZ TV stations that they had to pay fees in order to screen music videos. The TV stations disagreed, saying that they were providing free advertising for the music companies, and if they didn’t like that then they’d simply stop playing music videos. So they stopped playing all music videos.

“After a few weeks, cracks stated to appear as the music companies realised just how badly they needed the TV channels. One of the music companies bought an entire prime-time advertising block (at phenomenal cost, this wasn’t a single 30-second slot but every slot in an entire prime-time ad break) just to play one single new music video.

“Shortly afterwards, music videos reappeared on TV. The details of the settlement were never made public, but I imagine it consisted of a bunch of music company execs on their knees begging the TV stations to start playing music videos again and let’s please never bring this matter up again.”

—Paul Gutmann on Vista Content Protection

I would love to compare the log files for one of their websites from before and after this affair.

Fools Gold – Several good points! I think more than at any time in history the concept of publishing is changing, stressing the importance of how information dances around the internet or other distribution mechanisms even more than the information itself. Copyright rules did not anticipate so much slicing and dicing of content or the fact that monetization of content would take so many new and different forms. It’ll be interesting to see how the courts and new laws carve up the info landscape.

It is similar to simple mechanistic revisions in copyrighted compilations. Some copyrighted material may be available but underutilized. Someone else comes along and merely engages in a clerical reformatting and now has more valuable data, perhaps because he has presented it in alphabetical order or something. Does he deserve copyright protection or a value-added income stream? Is the quality of a search engine or atleast the reputation of a search engine an income stream that should be protected? A telephone directory is generally organized alphabetically but a google search results page is the result of more creative analysis. The ‘value added’ argument would give Google the right to analyze and present the data as they wished, with the initial creators of the data having nought but the right to pick up their marbles and go home empty handed.

Publishing is changing. Free public access to data is often viewed as a threat to the journals who feel that their screening and peer-review process adds quality that should generate revenue. Many journals are now available for only brief periods of time and then place their entire issue into a fee-only archives.