Steal This Article . . . Please!

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Steal This Article . . . Please!

2/1/2006

By Terry Calhoun

So, yet one more information dinosaur, fat reserves dwindling, wakes up from its long nap, looks around and is startled by change. Of course it then begins trampling around with its weight's worth of lawyers, trying to put the pieces of its broken eggs back together by legal force.

You guessed it. The dinosaur is the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) and its cohorts. They claim that search engines and news aggregators are stealing their content, and they want to be paid for it!

Many old business models do not work well with the Internet. Rather, they may work okay, but the Internet allows for new products and services that often compete more efficiently with the older products and services.

Some of the first efforts to restrict linking and posting of information on the Internet came from newspapers. I recall the first big case as having been in Scotland, where someone created a local newspaper but had no reporting staff and, instead, just published an online-only newspaper that linked to the previous newspaper's online articles but "framed" them in the new newspaper's look and feel.

The courts eventually held, in that case, that what is now called "deep linking" is okay, but that you cannot deep link to the information of others and try to present it in a way that consumers might be tricked into thinking that it is your own content.

This kind of "confusion as to content" is quite common. It's a long-standing, cyclical issue here at the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) that as soon as we publish a new issue of Planning for Higher Education, we start getting telephone calls and emails from people who want to buy from us the books--published by others--that we reviewed in the latest issue. (That actually may someday soon be a possibility, but it certainly never has been thus far, and this has been happening since before the Web existed.)

After the Scottish case, things were quiet on the deep linking front, but then public broadcasting entities and some other organizations decided to start putting user license agreements on their web pages stating that users swore not to deep link to any content past their front page without first getting written approval. Public opinion and good sense beat that effort down rather quickly.

Now, the latest: WAN, which represents 18,000 newspapers and 73 national newspaper associations, is smarter than most dinosaurs. It is, at least, beginning its efforts in Europe, where the principles of free speech and fair use are not as deeply embedded in the collective psyche as in the United States.

It's talking tough: "We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they're building [their business] on the back of kleptomania," says Gavin O'Reilly, president of WAN.