ACAP Blog
2010 – a critical moment for the copyright industries?
A reflection by Mark Bide, ACAP Project Director
The last few months of 2009 saw the debate about the future of the media in the internet age shifting into a discernibly higher gear. At least in part, this is because the reality of the global recession – and its impact on advertising revenues – has served to highlight the ongoing challenges that the newspaper sector is facing: not least the future of professional journalism. And the seriousness of the problem is now being recognized not only by publishers but also (perhaps rather late in the day) by regulators – a recent example being the US Federal Trade Commission’s examination of potential changes that might be made to regulation to provide assistance to the beleaguered US press. The recognition is beginning to dawn more widely – including in Brussels –that present trends, if they continue, will make the creation and dissemination of professional journalism an unsustainable activity, with far reaching consequences for society as a whole.
The solutions proposed by commentators range from a more-or-less complete dependency on citizen journalism to establishing the press as a “not for profit” sector, supported by voluntary donation. Indeed, both of these strands seem likely to form at least an element of the future of news creation and dissemination. However, few of those who have examined the situation dispassionately appear genuinely to believe that a “for-free” culture will enable us to sustain a plural and competitive media in the medium term – whether for news, education or entertainment.
Some sectors may be able to devise sustainable advertising-supported models, but these are unlikely to provide adequate revenue anything much beyond “life style businesses” which support their owner and perhaps a small staff. Even Huffington Post, often characterized as “the most successful news blog”, and substantially dependent both on citizen journalists and on news originally gathered by other organizations, is not believed to generate significant positive operating margins from its entirely advertising-supported model.
This has driven the newspapers, led prominently by News Corporation and Axel Springer, to a more public espousal of “pay” models, although (with a few notable exceptions) there seems now to be a hiatus while everyone waits for someone else to make the first move. At the same time, a number of publishers have also strongly hinted at an intention to withdraw all of their content from Google on the basis that there is an inadequate exchange of value between the search engines and the providers of news.
The reality of the relationship between search engines and news sites was eloquently exposed at the WAN/IFFRA Congress in Hyderabad at the beginning of December by Matt Kelly of Trinity Mirror. Speaking about his company’s revised approach to online publishing, ignoring the advice of Search Engine Optimization specialists and making their sites more accessible for people than for search engine crawlers, Kelly said.
The days of leading the newspaper industry by the hand, down the path of mythic riches, are coming to a rapid close.
As Gavin O’Reilly of Independent News and Media pointed out at the same event, traffic (particularly traffic driven by search engines) does not create revenue:
“…I can’t take clicks to my bank manager.”
However, if publishers are going to adopt paid-for content models, their need to regain control over the use and re-use of their content on the network becomes much more obvious than it has been in the decade or more in which they seemed happy to give their content away to everyone. Claims relating to the scope of “fair use” may become even more unconvincing when they relate to content held behind pay walls, but the opportunity to arbitrage access is starkly delineated where the choice is between paid-for and free.
We have seen exactly what happens on the internet when content owners create services which are advertising supported, but where they are unable effectively to control access to that content. The music industry, as so often the canary in the mine, has had the experience of launching advertising-supported music streaming sites, where other operators (claiming a legitimate role as “music search services”) have inserted themselves – and their advertising – between the original music site and the consumer – a model that feels very familiar and takes revenue from the content owner (where revenue is already very limited).
The media cannot continue to operate without a business model. And business models for content mean copyright. We have now seen quite clearly that nothing else works – and that an internet without copyright fails to provide a platform for the media.
There are those ready to give up on the internet and pin their hopes on mobile. iPhone apps appear to have potential – you can sell the app and sell the content. And mobile is predicted to be an explosive growth market. Here, at least, you can apparently ring fence access in ways which provide potentially profitable business models.
But this may prove to be illusory in anything other than the relatively short term. While Apple’s vision of the mobile market is indeed closed and proprietary, that vision is not shared by the company which is soon to become Apple’s biggest competitor in this market – Google. Phones running Google’s Android operating system – itself open source – are forecast to enjoy massive growth over the next few years. It seems likely, based on precedent, that the current model of protected content distribution will go the same way as proprietary content portals went with the spread of the World Wide Web in the mid 1990s.
So, is there no solution? Most of those present at the FTC meeting in Washington clearly believed that government intervention – except perhaps in relaxing some cross-media ownership regulation – would be likely to do more harm than good. So all the trends seem to be inexorably in the direction of destruction. Those who believe that “all information wants to be free” characterize this as “creative destruction”, but are notably unwilling to make much effort to forecast the creative part of this equation (as opposed to the destructive, which they often describe with some relish). Vague promises of the “monetization of the link economy” make little sense in hard economic terms. Not something you can take to the bank manager.
This is the issue to which the ACAP project has spoken since its inception in 2006. New ways need to be found to manage copyright on the network, working with the grain of the technology rather than across it. Technology provides us with unimaginable potential power to manage copyright “out of sight” – where it ought to be. By allowing machines to take over the heavy lifting of rights management in the 21st Century, we can press ahead with doing what needs to be done – creating the content and the business models on which to compete with one another, rather than having to competing with our distributors (legitimate and less so). That is what copyright gives us the opportunity to do – to choose who can use our content and how, to choose the channels through which we will distribute, to choose business models and pricing strategies.
But this cannot be achieved without the development of a new infrastructure, a rights management infrastructure fit for the internet. If it is to be acceptable, this has to operate seamlessly, in ways that are invisible to the user – in much the same way as when you use your phone, the whirring technology is completely invisible. ACAP is creating a modest but essential element of that infrastructure – the language in which machines can speak to one another, a language of rights and permissions. During 2010, ACAP will move beyond the constraints of the Use Cases for which its first version was conceived (managing the activity of search robots) to much wider use cases, where the requirement to manage copyright goes well beyond arguments about the efficacy (or otherwise) of the “Robots Exclusion Protocol”.
If they are going to pay for content, consumers will be intolerant of transaction inefficiencies – we need a common commercial framework around our disparate and diverse content. This may be difficult to realize, but we must weaken the capability of intermediaries to take control over our content – and over our brands – in ways which enable them to dictate our business models and our pricing. This implies an infrastructure that is owned in common –not one which is owned by a company with commercial interests which are divergent from those of the media. Our focus needs to be on creating an infrastructure that is universal –not confined to specific media but an open standard available to everyone. This is a challenge which news shares with the rest of the media.
Unless and until we can make copyright work on the network, the future is bleak – not only for the media (and those who depend on copyright for their livelihoods, as authors, composers and performers) but also for consumers. A future internet without high quality high value content will be drab and uninteresting, a place of unreliable, unbranded and low attention information. On the other hand, an internet which is “copyright enabled” has the potential to be a vibrant and creative space, in which large quantities of new and exciting content is made available to consumers.
2010 is the year when we should turn that corner.
Posted: 18/01/2010 14:52:30 by
Tessa Thier | with 0 comments
