Fair use. Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test.
Fair use is one of the traditional safety valves intended to balance the public's interest in open access with the property interests of copyright holders. Fair use under United States law[edit] The legal concept of "test copyright" was first ratified by the United Kingdom of Great Britain's Statute of Anne of 1709. Once these factors were codified as guidelines in 17 U.S.C. § 107, they were not rendered exclusive. Why I believe in the link economy | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters.
The following is a guest column by Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters. “Do unto others” It’s a simple standard my mom taught me when I was a kid – yours probably taught it too. It isn’t always easy, but in business it’s a good guiding light if you don’t want your company to be evil. Recently there has been a rising crescendo of finger-pointing, shrieking, braying and teeth-gnashing about the future of the news. In the last couple of weeks there have been many comments on the AP’s proposals, Attributor’s proposals, Ian Shapira’s story and fair use.
After some of the AP commentary, I posted a tweet directed at Jeff Jarvis that prompted some members in the community to ask me to be more outspoken, asking me to be blatant about it, to post a public statement. To start, yes the global economy is fairly grim and the cyclical aspects of our business are biting extremely hard in the face of the structural changes. I believe in the link economy.
How (and why) to replace the AP. The Associated Press is becoming the enemy of the internet because it is fighting the link and the link is the basis of the internet. From Richard Perez-Pena’s New York Times story today: Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs.
Them’s fightin’ words: quoting an article’s headline while linking to it would require licensing? This means we would have to get permission from and negotiate with sites before linking to them. The AP would rather destroy the link economy. But that’s not the reason to replace it (it’s merely a bonus). The AP’s primary job is to distribute content. Could the AP remake itself? A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web. Chris Ahearn: @jeffjarvis Reuters stands... What Would Fair Use Look Like in an Online Era? « J-School: Educ. Summary: this would be a new four-part test to add to the already existing four-part “fair use” test. The presence and quality of the link.Does the new format provide the opportunity for democratic engagement that is unavailable at the original provider?
Courts should consider this balance: between the added value of information (provided by the so-called appropriator) and amount of appropriation of the “original” work.What is the overall purpose and character of the appropriating organization? I’m not a lawyer, though I have spent a lot of time thinking about copyright law, fair-use, the so-called “hot news doctrine,” and other related matters over the last few months. The argument over this has gotten so ridiculously stupid, its difficult to recap all the recent back and forth without this turning into a very long blog post. But the nadir of the argument was summed up in the New York Times article mentioned above: 1. 2. 3. 4. I want to be clear that I don’t think this list is exclusive.
Ian Shapira -- How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story - washin. A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post. I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace.
Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered. But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man? I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job - corporate. Today's Papers 2009 - A summary of what's in the major U.S. news. Business Coach Anne Loehr Tries to Bridge Diverse Generations: X. High atop the august Tower Club in Fairfax County, overlooking the glass-and-steel edge city of Tysons Corner, business coach Anne Loehr is teaching 20 executives, mainly baby boomers, how to crack one of society's most vexing workplace problems -- how to deal with their youngest employees or clients.
Loehr, 44 (Generation X/self-identified boomer), asks the class: "What is it like to speak to Gen Y? " In her seminar, "Get Wise With Gen Ys: How to Effectively Sell to Each Generation in Today's Workplace," Loehr zeroes in on people born in the late 1970s or early 1980s, a demographic cohort so mystifying to its elders that she hands out cheat-sheet wallet cards enumerating traits that supposedly define this exotic generation. This is, she explains, the first time in American history when four generations -- people born from the 1930s all the way to the 1980s -- are jammed together in the workplace, jostling for hegemony.
Talk like what, exactly? Start-Up Attributor Tries to Track Pirated Journalism - NYTimes. How Reuters Should Be Responding To The AP's Suicide. Earlier today we wrote about the AP's plans to DRM the news, explaining what a backwards plan it was. The story is getting lots of play elsewhere, with many pointing to a NY Times report, where the AP's CEO Tom Curley makes some amazing statements: "If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we're going to do that," Mr.
Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use. First of all, someone should sit Curley down and explain to him fair use -- a concept of which he appears to be ignorant. Meanwhile, Ryan Chittum, at the Columbia Journalism Review says that people should chill out because the AP isn't going after bloggers, he seems to miss a few points.
"We want to stop wholesale misappropriation of our content which does occur right now--people who are copying and pasting or taking by RSS feeds dozens or hundreds of our stories. " A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web. Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard » Blog Archive » A.P. goes nuclear on. “A.P. Cracks Down on Unpaid Use of Articles on Web.” That’s the headline on a New York Times article right now.
But if you read the article, you see that the Associated Press’s new campaign isn’t only about “unpaid use of articles,” it’s about any use of headlines as links. In other words, it sounds like A.P. is pulling the pin on a legal Doomsday Machine for news and information on the Web — claiming that there is no fair use right to link to articles using a brief snippet of verbiage from that article, or the original headline on the article. In other words, if that Times story were by the A.P., I would be breaking the A.P.’s new rules just by using the ten words at the beginning of this post. The A.P. seems to want to try to squeeze money both from Google and from sites that aggregate headlines.
This move is foolish and self-defeating. As I wrote last year: UPDATE: Zach Seward at Nieman Lab has a post covering some of the legal aspects of this story. Post Revisions: AP launches campaign against Internet "misappropriation" We'd better hope it's not "hot news" that the Associated Press announced "an aggressive effort to track down copyright violators on the Internet" at its annual board meeting Monday. If it is, we could conceivably find ourselves on the wrong end of an "aggressive effort" geared to fend off copycat competition and "misappropriation" in the dwindling market for timely reporting. One could be forgiven for thinking it's not news at all, given AP's already fierce defense of its content, ranging from much-mocked threats to sue bloggers over brief quotations to tussles with news aggregators to the heavily publicized court battle with artist Shepard Fairey over an iconic image of Barack Obama.
But exact words matter. In his prepared remarks, AP Chairman Dean Singleton invoked that ur-angry newsman Howard Beale, claiming the agency would "no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more. " Associated Press Tries To DRM The News. Pr_072309a.html. On the link economy « BuzzMachine. Arnon Mishkin says he has found the fallacy of the link economy but I think his argument is itself built on some fallacies, among them: * If links are not valuable, then fine, get rid of them: refuse all aggregators’ and search engines’ robots, complain so much about links that no one bothers to link to you (a la the AP).
Or put all your stuff behind a pay wall where the links won’t pay off. Where are you then? Without discovery. Without audience. Without a means to monetize audience. . * Links are worth what the recipient makes of them. . * Implicit in the argument by Mishkin and others is the assumption that readers fill up sufficiently on news on aggregated headline pages and so they don’t click on the links and thus the aggregator delivered the value rather than the content creator. . * The math of Mishkin’s argument falls apart for me. Mishkin writes: Historically, the value of those casual browsers was captured by the newspaper because the readers would have to buy a copy. The imperatives of the link economy. How much traffic will a prominent link on Huffington Post bring? In recent months, news aggregators like the Huffington Post have received heated criticism from some who believe they’re stealing valuable traffic and ad revenue from newspapers.
Appeals court Judge Richard Posner recently wrote a widely-linked post arguing that copyright law should be changed in order to bar linking to websites and paraphrasing their content. Some newspapers execs argue that news aggregators simply repackage news so there’s little incentive to click on the actual link. So how much traffic does a large news aggregator like Huffington Post bring? I’ve been linked several times within Huffington Post, but typically on its users blogs, which only send a few hundred readers at most. But on early Friday I was fortunate enough to be featured prominently on Huffington Post’s front page with a banner headline linking to one of my articles. How much traffic did this link bring?
Lots. So one link, 37,000 eyeballs. The link economy is sinking fast | Dan Kennedy. Rupert Murdoch's move to charge for content opens doors for comp. Vivian Schiller, now CEO of National Public Radio in the US, said in an interview with Newsweek last week that talk of charging for news online is "mass delusion". She should know. Schiller was head of nytimes.com when it charged and then stopped charging for its content. If you can charge for your content - if you are the FT or the Wall Street Journal, the only brands that do it successfully - and your readers can make money on your content, and pass the cost of it onto their employers I have nothing against it. But for most, pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it is not only futile but possibly suicidal. Charging for content brings marketing and customer-service costs. When publishers build those walls, they open the door for free competitors, who can now enter the content business with virtually no barrier to entry.
FT editor Lionel Barber has predicted that most newspapers will charge online because they should - and should never have given away their content. Jay Rosen: Twilight for the Curmudgeons. Neil Henry (ex-Washington Post, now at Berkeley J-School) wants reparations from Google for what it's done to news. I hope the San Francisco Chronicle keeps Neil Henry's essay--Google Owes Big Journalism Big Time--free and clear of any pay walls.
Link rot must not be allowed to set in, for this is a document. Henry teaches journalism at UC Berkeley, after a distinguished career at the Washington Post. He has a new book out, American Carnival ("Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media. ") According to this account, Henry almost became dean at the Berkeley J-School. Neil Henry has a grievance: I see a world where corporations such as Google and Yahoo continue to enrich themselves with little returning to journalistic enterprises, all this ultimately at the expense of legions of professional reporters across America, now out of work because their employers in "old" media could not afford to pay them. And for that grievance there is to be redress: Fund our journalism schools.
No, you don't. Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. Quote 5 Words From the Associated Press? That’ll Be $12.50. We've known that the Associated Press has some odd policies in regards to social media and the web for a while. The AP social media policy says that employees need to control not only what they said on Facebook, but what their friends said as well. We also got wind last week of the AP's plan to find where anyone uses AP material online in an attempt to stop what it considers unauthorized use of its content. To say it's causing controversy would be an understatement. Part of the AP's plan is to charge for use of its articles if you quote 5 words or more. They signed a deal with iCopyright in April last year to accomplish this goal. iCopyright is a widget that handles not only print and email, but republishing as well. Well the widget's starting to get some attention, if only for the jaw-dropping starting price the AP is charging for quoting its stories: $2.50 per word.The process goes like this: you copy and paste the excerpt or article you want to reprint.
What do you think? The Paper That Doesn’t Want to Be Free. Newspapers’ Original Sin: Not failing to charge but failing to i. Dan Kennedy: GateHouse Media and the New York Times deserve cred. Eric Gauvin » “the link economy” More on the Link Economy: End of Media as We Knew It | BNET Tech. The Business Problem of the Link Economy | BNET Technology Blog. Self-Service Online Advertising - Help.
Digg's Miserable Business. Online. Arianna Huffington: The Web's New Oracle -- Printout - NYT Co.’s top lawyer doubts that aggregation is a copyright issu. Arianna Huffington: The Debate Over Online News: It's the Consum. Huffington Post | Media. The link economy v. the content economy « BuzzMachine. Who Benefits from the "Link Economy"? | BNET Intercom | BNET. How the Link Economy Benefits Reuters -
Google dubbed internet parasite by WSJ editor. The ethic of the link layer on news « BuzzMachine.