A couple of media lawyers want to change the copyright laws to make the indexing of news articles illegal. I wonder if they want to save journalism or expedite its demise. Here are some highights from their proposal:
– Bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine. Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the “fair use” doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts — republishing a quote to comment on it, for example — is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.
– Federalize the “hot news” doctrine. This doctrine protects against types of poaching that copyright might not cover — the stealing of information not by direct copying but simply by taking the guts of the content. While the Internet has made news vulnerable to pilfering because of the ease of linking from one site to the next, the hot-news doctrine has limited use because it is only recognized in a few states.
– Eliminate ownership restrictions. Media insolvency is a greater threat today than media concentration. Congress should abolish caps on ownership of broadcast stations and bars on newspaper and television ownership in the same market. These outdated rules belong to an era when the Web was a home for spiders.
– Use tax policy to promote the press. Washington state is taking a lead in the current crisis with legislation signed into law this week to slash business taxes on the press by 40 percent. Congress could provide incentives for placing ads with content creators (not with Craigslist) and allowances for immediate write-offs (rather than capitalization) for all expenses related to news production.
– Grant an antitrust exemption. Congress first came to journalism’s defense with antitrust relief in 1970, when it permitted endangered newspapers to combine their business operations without fear of antitrust suits if their newsrooms remained independent.
So they basically want the government to help them cling on to a dying business model.
A little more than ten years ago, I stumbled out of a liberal arts college with a mediocre GPA into a job with a weekly business journal with a smallish circulation in my hometown of Memphis, Tenn. I’d never studied business or journalism, and I came from a family of academics. I didn’t even really understand what a stock was. But there was something I loved about it. I had great editors, and I was learning a ton everyday about everything from how to get information out of people to where I was supposed to put a comma and where I was definitely not supposed to put a comma. Like most great careers, I just sort of fell into it, and I’ve been there ever since. I’ve covered everything from old money cotton brokers to Facebook, and I’ve met some of the most fascinating people in the world along the way.