“We Need To Change Copyright Laws To Save Newspapers” by Eric Clemons and Nehal Madhani is so terribly misguided as to be laughable if it weren’t representative of the views of so many powerful individuals. Clemons and Madhani relate the exigency of the fair use doctrine of US copyright law: Inexpensive photocopying made the need for the right to use limited amounts of copyrighted material for commentary, instruction, criticism, reporting, and research apparent. In short, technology made cheap copies easy and the law was revised to protect both the rights of the creator and the needs of the culture.
But Clemons and Madhani use that adjustment to veer off into the deep weeds with everything they write after that, calling for even more restrictive copyright laws.
“Nothing in prior judicial analysis anticipated the online reuse of protected content, nearly instantaneously, in massive quantities, and to an audience that can be as large as the copyright owner’s audience,” write Clemons and Madhani. Really? If you read the amendments to Title 17 since 1976 up to the horrendous Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, it would seem that US policymakers had a pretty good handle on any anticipated reuse of protected content, including the internet — the world’s largest and fastest copy machine.
Clemons and Madhani go on to draw an apparent link between news aggregators like Google and the “death” of “traditional print media publications.” This is where they take a hard right into the ditch. First of all, it’s questionable whether traditional print media publications are dying. Secondly, so what if they are? Big metro daily newspapers are losing their monopolies, but community print news readership is actually increasing. Joe Kimball, writing for MinnPost.com in March 2009, cites a National Newspaper Association poll showing “that in 2008, 86 percent of adults read a local community newspaper each week, compared with 83 percent in 2007 and 81 percent in 2005.” And as Alan Mutter wrote nearly two years ago, newspapers still generate roughly 20 percent annual profit.
Similarly there’s no shortage of magazines. While many high-quality titles have closed, 752 new titles launched between September 2008 and September 2009 according to a citation by Matt Kinsman writing for Folio last year.
As for book publishing, consider that a recent historical comparison of the 19th century industrial expansion of Germany and England attributes Germany’s industrial prowess to the absence of copyright law and the wide availability of published material.
That’s not to say the general business models of the incumbent corporate media won’t fail. They most assuredly will. No one has pointed this out better than Clay Shirky in his March 2009 “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” Comes the internet and neither the creators nor the culture need newspapers; but both need journalism. That leaves the publishers and their expensive infrastructure odd-men out. As Shirky writes, “When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society,’ the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.” Hopefully before we jump to protectionist legislation we’ll collectively realize that while we still need the wine, we have no real use for the old bottles.
What Clemons and Madhani fail to grasp is that lead paragraphs available on Google News and other aggregation sites actually serve to drive traffic to the originating source — the authoritative source — of the content. The unthinkable of which Shirky writes has been here for some time. Time for the incumbent corporate media to adapt or die.