The latest iteration of publishers trying to ensure that its content is being paid for — which is obviously well within their rights when they actually own the copyright — is NewsRight, launched by the Associated Press. TechDirt had this to say about the venture:
It doesn’t sound like they’ll totally pull a Righthaven, where their first move is to sue, but rather (from the various vague descriptions) it sounds like NewsRight will be going around simply trying to get blogs and aggregators to buy a license. But here’s the thing: on what legal basis? That’s the part that’s not clear. Much of what blogs and newspapers do is simply not infringing (even if the AP likes to pretend it is). There may be some extreme cases where there is infringement, but most standard cases seem like classic fair use. And that’s where it gets worrisome that this turns into a legal shakedown — whereby sites are pressured to pay up just to avoid a legal fight, no matter how strong the legal position of these sites might be.
But, much more to the point, nothing in this plan appears to be about adding value. That’s the key way to determine if a business model is heading in the right direction, or if it’s really just someone trying to “free ride” on the work of someone else. NewsRight appears to be the worst kind of free rider, honestly. They’re not adding any value — they’re just demanding people pay up to avoid a negative cost (the legal threat). Also telling? The company admits that half the staff is… lawyers, and that appears to include the company’s CEO.
The licensing fees aren’t public yet; the question is – who will be able to afford NewsRight’s license if the model is aggressive? From the publisher’s standpoint, NewsRight says it is “accepting new applications for news organizations and bloggers who want to syndicate their content.”
BusinessWeek explains the dilemma facing the AP with its Righthaven-lite NewsRight:
The fundamental problem the AP faces is the same as that faced by virtually every traditional news entity as a result of the “democratization of distribution”—namely, how can it control the flow of content as it used to? The short answer is it can’t, which has disrupted the way the AP functions in more ways than one. Twitter and other tools have taken on many of the aspects of a real-time newswire. The AP faces other competitors as well, including such upstarts asNewsCred, which has built a content-licensing system, and even Google itself.
News entities such as the Guardian have tried to take advantage of the new ecosystem of news by turning themselves into open platforms—but others like the AP seem determined to reinvent the monopolies they used to have before the Web existed. For NewsRight, the big test will come when it offers onerous licensing terms to an aggregator: What happens when an organization such as The Huffington Post says “no, thank you?” That’s when it will become obvious how much of NewsRight’s business model is based on carrots—and how much of it is about waving a big stick.
http://tinyurl.com/6ozt3lv
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