Reposted as single post 10-07 from 03-26 Notes
But Papers Won't Be Paper
In our last post ("Yotta-Yotta-Yottabytes: Content Makes Kings, Print Dies") we touched on themes in ongoing conversations all over the web and in newspapers about the seeming demise of reporting -- not just science reporting -- any reporting. We mentioned copyright and aggregators, and questioned trends towards online aggregation that mimic print monopolization. Clearly aggregators add value by collecting in one accessible place news for all the readers. Aggregators also fulfill their own business goals by collecting more advertising revenue than, say, two person online content generators. But lots of unresolved issues need to be ironed out.
To me a key question is intellectual property -- I know, so yesteryear. But consider the site that collects all the free Creative Commons lectures from Universities like Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Berkeley, and posts these under a non-Creative Commons site license with prominent use of the Ivy's names (to establish the site's credentials). "Academic Earth", not to be confused with LexisNexis's "Academic Universe", now promises that they will "try" to keep the content as "open as possible". In another move bound to endear AE to the professors whose lectures they use, the site owners "grade" the lectures, starting with "B".
Last week, I saw another site with text and photos from older works (before 1921) released into the public domain, with warnings that the company had "added value" (imperceptibly), so that now all the works were copyrighted and needed to be purchased. 1 These are two examples in the wide open arena where creative content producers try to eek out a living, copyright protection flounders under the ubiquitous ease of internet infringement, and sites that recycle, remix, or analyze content, navigate sometimes unclear boundaries.
This week Google removed thousands of videos from its YouTube site, based on a Warner's demand to removed all of its copyrighted songs, even including those obscure videos where your aunt Milly sings her favorite 60's tune while your uncle plays the piano. As of last week, every video was taken down, robotically removed.
In another case, last week BoingBoing posted a note submitted by site "Apartment Therapy" about a take-down notice the NYT sent to the home decorating site. A.T. said:
"We are shocked & disappointed their [NYT] first contact with concerns about our use of their images (in posts about their stories!) was a threatening letter & DMCA takedown notice to our ISP who have warned us they will disable our servers if we don't comply with the NY Times request." (emphasis ours)
But to be fair, it's not the first time NYT contacted Apartment Therapy. BoingBoing wrote another post five years ago excerpting another AT protest about the New York Times, who in that June, 2004 situation, contacted them by phone to again request they take down copy-righted content. Was that the "first" time? Who knows.
BoingBoing had one take on the Apartment Therapy/NYT mediation: "Pop quiz: You're a troubled media dinosaur struggling to find your way on the Web. What steps can you take to actively discourage people from linking to you, thus reducing your pageviews and revenue?" BoingBoing readers weighed in on whether that was a fair assessment. Some BoingBoing commenters observed that the decorating site actually posts all the photos and content from NYT articles, making the link to NYT several clicks in totally meaningless. While AT may come to some agreement with NYT the larger issue of copyright is less likely to sort itself out prettily.
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1 I stumbled on several sites like this last week -- unknown name.
