Radical copyright solution amid the NYT Twittering

May 13, 2009

There has been a spate of stories of late about how newspapers could implement charging for online content. We’ve opted not to say much on this until the dust settles, not least because little seems to challenge Clay Shirky’s brilliant analysis of the situation, but a piece in the Guardian about the New York Times catches our eye. Buried amid the Web 2.0 zeitgeisty stuff – details of the NYT’s plans were published on Twitter – one solution to newspapers’ cash shortfall promises to change the nature of copyright law. As the Guardian has it:

[The NYT] company is also exploring ways to recoup money from those who profit from infringing its copyright. At the moment NYT lawyers take one of two approaches to copyright infringement: either letting it ride, or choosing to “squash” infringers “like mosquitoes”. They are now exploring a third way, which would involve convincing advertising providers – such as Google – to hand over a proportion of the profits made by infringing websites straight to the copyright holder.

This is quite startling, for it means, among at least some of those charged with securing revenue for the NYT, that copyright law is, in effect, seen as useless in the modern world. What is therefore proposed is that advertising providers be persuaded to do the right thing.

It’s a thought, but will it catch on?

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.