ONLINE JOURNALISM
INTERVIEWS
Jaron Lanier
News sites get
In recent weeks, an increasing number of online news publications have begun
featuring links on staff-written stories that grant instant reprint and
permission rights — for a price. These online clearance systems permit a
user to purchase the rights to republish a news story on another site, or
e-mail a formatted copy of the story to groups of recipients, or print out
formatted copies for personal or business use.
Anyone who has sought reprint rights from a newspaper knows that the process
can be as pleasant as a tooth extraction. Like countless other reporters, I
was once barred from photocopying my story clips at Kinko's until I produced
a note from the principal — um, release form from corporate. But what of
copyright in the free-for-all of cyberspace, where Napster has fed our
appetite for swapping files without conscience, much less with clearance
from a controlling legal authority?
The Copyright Clearance Center wants
you and me to know that the rules remain the same. "The Web loosened the
inhibitions of people to borrow other people's property, but that doesn't
change the law, which automatically gives you copyright protection the
moment you produce a piece of content," says Rick Miller, manager of market
analysis for Boston-based CCC. Miller thinks people will warm to the
Web-based system, which "cuts the approval time from two weeks to two
minutes."
CCC, which handles licensing rights for about 10,000 print publications,
debuted its new online service in the New York Times in March and will roll
out similar services on the Web sites of the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe this summer. (A
precursor of the service can be seen on Dow Jones' djreprints.com.)
A competing instant clearance service in Renton, Wash., called iCopyright.com represents 300
publications, including online newspapers in Knoxville, Tenn., Raleigh, N.C., and Santa Fe
and Albuquerque, N.M. The Los
Angeles Times recently canceled its arrangement with iCopyright, citing lack
of use by readers, while the financial news site CBSMarketWatch.com signed up on
May 15.
Under both the CCC and iCopyright systems, each client publication sets its
own rules and rates. CBSMarketWatch charges $5 to e-mail a formatted story
to 1-20 recipients and charges sites $1,500 for permission to post an
article for up to three month and $4,800 for up to a year. (Earth to
MarketWatch: You'll get no takers at these rates.) The Albuquerque Journal
also got a bit carried away, charging not just for e-mail and posting rights
but for linking to the Journal's articles. In an amazing bit of chutzpah,
the paper charges 50 bucks to deep-link to a Journal article with the
publisher's blessing, and the link stays live for only seven days — not
exactly the best bargain on the Web.
While CCC and iCopyright have a head start among online publications,
several other newcomers are angling for a piece of the action. It may be a
big pie: the American Society for Industrial Security estimates that stolen
information costs U.S. businesses more than $300 billion annually.
Among the new breed of digital rights management companies:
"Napster sent a wakeup call to media CEOs," says Ranjit Singh, president of
ContentGuard. "Publishers are now looking around for solutions to protect
their online assets from being compromised."
Second thoughts at the New York Times
Treading gingerly into the bubbling cauldron of online copyright is The New York Times. The paper's new online
permissions system debuted March 23 in its Business
section, and the Times had planned to roll out the service in every
other section by late April.
In that original version, the company charged $300 for permission to reprint
an article in an online newsletter, whether it has 20 subscribers or
199,999. It cost $200 to reprint a nytimes.com headline in a book. And it
set you back $250 for "internet use" of an article, though republishing the
same article in an "online magazine" cost $600. Plans were afoot to charge
users for the privilege of e-mailing an article to more than 20 recipients.
But earlier this month the Times overhauled its permission system to
eliminate all references to online uses. Now, you can reprint Times stories
in a book, magazine or print newsletter, but if you want to use it online,
you'll have to phone the company.
Peter Simmons, director of The New York Times Agency, who's in charge of
implementing the new system, says the Times still charges the same rates for
digital use of its content, but pulled those pricings from its site because
"we were premature. New York Times Digital asked us to hold off for a while.
The idea is, let's see how this goes and what happens with it. We want to
make sure we're on the right track." Down the road, the Times plans to again
add online pricings for digital reprints, but no time frame has been set, he
says.
Meantime, CCC, the Times' longtime partner in licensing rights, says that
online clearances are the wave of the future in the industry and dismisses
competitors' approaches that "lock down" online content through special
coding or encryption. "Newspapers and magazines aren't in the game of
locking down their content," Miller says.
When copyright goes too far
Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the
cyber-rights advocacy group, goes further, warning that both encryption and
the new breed of online permissions systems threaten to impede the free flow
of information.
"We forget how much we rely on fair use and unauthorized quoting in everyday
life," he says. "If they could, these digital rights management companies
would build a machine into our bodies to prevent us from singing a song in
the shower because, technically, that may be an infringement of a
copyrighted work. Since they can't do that, they've decided to build it into
the Internet.
"Stringent enforcement of copyright can be harmful to free speech, dissent
— the things that let us talk freely about our culture," Tien says. "No one
particular set of controls is all that onerous, but taken in the aggregate,
these systems encumber speech. There's a certain velocity with which
information now moves in this society, and copyright protections curtail
that free exchange of ideas.
"News publications think of content as property, a commodity, a jewel, and
so it's tempting for them to want to place technological fences around their
content to extract the maximum amount of profit," he says. "But what you're
talking about is also speech, from a First Amendment viewpoint, and it's
also culture, something we all participate in and have a stake in. The news
is something that creates a vital sense of community for any society. People
should be free to share and transmit news items without having to jump
through all the hoops that content controllers want to impose."
Tien reminds us that copyright law sprouted from centuries-old trade
regulations that were put into place to protect businesses against unjust
competition, so that a publisher couldn't simply copy and republish a
competitor's story without investing any resources into doing the legwork
and reporting. "But over the last century its meaning has expanded from a
means of regulating businesses into a truncheon being wielded against
consumers," he says. "And now the content controllers also want to be the
arbiters of what constitutes fair use."
It's a fair bet that news publishers looking to broaden their offerings will
soon turn to serialized e-books, celebrity images and digital music that
rely heavily on encryption schemes. Users who crack those "electronic
envelopes" to get at the restricted content would automatically be in
violation of the overly broad 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In other words, a teenager who makes an unauthorized copy of Sarah Michelle
Gellar's photo from a protected news site would be guilty of a felony. (Also see Not-So-Public Figures.)
Certainly, indiscriminate pirating of online publications' content should
not be tolerated. But a begrudging, puritan approach to copyright will be
not only harmful to public discourse but ultimately self-defeating.
Those who most strongly back the tightening of copyright rules online take a
narrow view of the Internet's increasingly vital role in our lives. The Net
is not a channel; it's the ocean. The Net is not just another medium, like
publishing or television or cinema. It's the future of all communication
between people in different places.
What's ahead? Look for more publications to adopt online permissions systems
in the coming year. And look for those systems to be widely ignored in an
ever-widening cultural rift.
Psst! Wanna trade that Wall Street Journal article for a slightly used
Vapors MP3?
copyright fever
But are they undermining free speech
on the Net in the process?
This column appeared June 14, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here's the version on the OJR site.
By J.D. Lasica
If you're like me, you probably feel a twinge of moral ambiguity every time
you download a free MP3 file — say, the Vapors' "Turning Japanese." (OK, so
maybe no harm there.) But what's an ethically upright citizen of the Web to
do when she comes across the curious little copyright icons and permissions
notices that have begun to sprout at the bottom of various online
publications?
'There's a certain velocity with which information now moves in this society, and copyright protections curtail that free exchange of ideas.'
– Lee Tien, EFF
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