ACAP Blog
Gatehouse Media/New York Times settlement
Many of you will probably have taken note of a story earlier this week about the settlement http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/GHS/530420019x0x267768/3033b0e7-7aff-4dc8-83e6-204ce95044f4/267768.pdf between Gatehouse Media and the New York Times Co. A description http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR2009012601590.html of the dispute and its settlement written by David Kaplan can be found at the Washington Post. In explaining why Gatehouse Media had taken its competitor to court, Kaplan says:
“But more than the use of its content, the publisher was frustrated that the links do an end-run around the ads on its homepage. And that's something that could become a major issue for other small newspapers facing increased competition from hyperlocal news sites and dwindling ad spending”
The current global financial situation is inevitably focusing all online publishers much more clearly on their online revenue potential. Commentators like Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine http://www.buzzmachine.com/ can argue all they like that publishers should embrace “the link economy” and welcome all uses and reuses of their content online – but publishers have yet to find any way of making “the link economy” pay the bills. And no amount of theorising has yet resolved this basic conundrum as Eric Schmidt of Google made clear in a recent interview http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/lashinsky_google.fortune/index.htm .
The settlement that has been reached between Gatehouse Media and NYT does not touch on any of the core arguments about whether the “scraping” techniques used to extract content from Gatehouse Media sites is or is not “fair use”, and it can certainly be argued that the cost of taking a case to court will continue to be a major deterrent to anyone resolving this question. We have seen others step away from the same dispute recently. But the settlement hinges on the implementation (by both parties, presumably) of “commercially reasonably technological solutions” (without specifying what these might be).
This settlement goes to the heart of the ACAP argument – that owners of copyright content must be free to decide how their content is used online, in exactly the same way as they are able to make those decisions offline. But it is only realistic to be able to make decisions of this kind if you are properly able to communicate them within the information supply chain; and on the network that means communicating them at machine-to-machine level – nothing else is scalable (or indeed “commercially reasonable”).
ACAP provides a solution that is both scalable and sufficiently flexible to allow online publishers to make real informed choices about the exploitation of their content by third parties. ACAP is a solution for the time has definitely come.
Posted: 03/02/2009 13:02:24 by
Tessa Thier | with 0 comments
