Archive for ‘Copyright’:


When It Comes to Online Media, Just The Facts Are Free . . .

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report is once again upon us. As in the past, it confirms that the majority of us get our information online and that we do not want to pay for it, subscribe to it, or pay-per-click for an article.

The facts may be free, but getting them collected, edited, checked, and delivered to you online or otherwise still costs money. Like almost every else When It Comes to Online Media, Just the Facts Are Freeyou do in this life, you do get what you pay for. The old joke of “hiring’em young while they still got all the answers” may work fine for opining in the blogosphere, but may not cut it in the “knock three times and tell’em Dan sent you” world of investigative journalism.

Then there is this little issue of legality. At the recent OnCopyright 2010 conference put together by the Copyright Clearance Center in New York City, a self-proclaimed investigative blogger lamented the chilling effect of the many defensive lawsuits filed against him. While we may be prejudiced against the larger media organizations at times, they can stand up to this type of intimidation. To preempt the criticism they vet their sources and data prior to publishing and if that’s not enough they have financial resources to support their position.

Back to free; the cry is that everything should be free on the Internet . . . Well it never has been and never will be. The content and information you get every day on the web is being paid for by somebody, usually advertisers. For lots of reasons we can look at later, this subsidy is just not cutting it.

So if we want reliable, vetted information we have to support its creation. In other words, we have to pay for it. The organizations that are creating vetted content are searching for a way to do this. There are a number of models being tried currently.

  1. The pay-wall which is in place at a number of sites and variations are being implemented by the Financial Times and the New York Times.
  2. The pay-by-article model for which you pay only for what you read á la iTunes.
  3. A central subscription service for many participating providers.

I believe all of these are doomed to fail. However, I do believe there is a fourth solution that could prove viable and consumer-friendly. It would be a hybrid of the pay-by-article model and the aggregated subscription combined with some as of yet unreleased technology.

Over the coming weeks, I look forward to examining more closely some of these monetization options and having a bit of discourse on the topic. In the interim, I strongly recommend that anyone whose livelihood, especially journalists and public relations professionals, is tied to media read the Pew Report. And share their thoughts with myself and the readers of BurrellesLuce Fresh Ideas.

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Posted in Copyright, Media Industry, Technology | 2 Comments »

The Market Speaks

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Gail Nelson
It’s Tuesday, and in my role as a consumer, I am feeling very empowered. And it feels … good.iStock_Communication_Small

Amid privacy concerns, Facebook is turning off its controversial Beacon service, which tells one’s friends about your purchases. You may recall the brouhaha that ensued when Beacon was launched. (A synopsis: By default, data about the online purchasing habits of Facebook users were automatically shared with other members of their network, and it was near impossible to opt-out if you didn’t catch a single fleeting pop-up window. Responding to consumer protest, Facebook made Beacon an opt-in program within weeks of launch. But in the end, many pundits supported the inevitably of this direction – a way for social networks to make money and marketers to capitalize on an automated form of word-of-mouth marketing.)

Now, due to privacy lawsuits, the entire program has been dismantled, and Facebook will pay $ 9.5 million in settlement charges, some of which will fund a new privacy foundation. (Read  “Facebook To Wind Down Beacon to Resolve Privacy Lawsuit” on MediaPost.)

T-Mobile joins Facebook in learning the hard way that it doesn’t pay to force customers to do what they don’t want to do, even if it’s the “right thing.” With consumer adoption of paperless invoices stalling, T-Mobile decided to charge for the privilege of receiving a hard-copy bill beginning in August. The new policy applied to new and existing clients.  At first, the program seemed to be a smashing success. After months of sluggish conversion rates spurred by voluntary “go green” marketing programs, requests for electronic invoicing exploded. (See The New York Times article, “What if People Don’t Take the Bait to Go Paperless?”)  But after a class-action lawsuit spearheaded by disgruntled clients asserted that the mandatory charge was a “material modification” to T-Mobile’s contract, T-Mobile rescinded the program.

I can understand T-Mobile’s interest in curbing paper invoicing. The paper, ink, and fossil fuels used in producing and sending paper invoices degrade the environment. Saving on the cost of mailings, especially in these tough economic times, allow businesses to hold the line on pricing, reduce the need for layoffs, and fund new products and services. But today’s consumer will use every tool at their disposal to avoid being strong-armed. These days, you need to talk to your customers, and get most of them on board, before you change policies.  

The T-Mobile situation caught my eye because we have a situation analogous to theirs: After BurrellesLuce’s “go green with paperless billing” marketing campaign had penetrated as far as it could, Client Services (CS) began to reach out to each of our clients (much in the same way both our CS and Sales teams  had done a couple of years ago when we launched a “turnkey copyright compliance” program so PR and communications could legally share their online news clips.) Anyway, as a result, in just a few months, the percentage of clients receiving electronic bills has jumped from less than 20 percent to almost 90 percent. Most of the change was the result of dialogue.

What do you think? Could the T-Mobile and Facebook initiatives have succeeded had they been implemented differently?  As a public relations professional, how would you advise Facebook and T-Mobile to proceed? And as a consumer and a citizen, what do you think of the role of lawsuits in changing the behaviors of these companies?

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Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Client Services, Copyright, Public Relations | 4 Comments »

Google Alert Users: Are You Getting What Google’s Not Paying For?

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Twitter was so abuzz with discussion about Google and fair use of AP content that I couldn’t resist riffing off yesterday’s post by BurrellesLuce Executive Vice President Steve Shannon regarding AP copyright discussions.

The graphic below shows tweet results for the terms “Google,” “AP,” “Copyright,” “NAA” (Newspaper Association of America) and “ACAP” (Automated Content Access Protocol). If one were to review quantitative share of conversation yielded by this graph you would think Google “owns” the conversation; however a qualitative look into these conversations shows if Google were to engage in a “pay-per-click” micro-payment system for copyrighted content, the search giant risks being abandoned by some searchers.

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If public relations teaches us anything it’s that huge fires can be started by a small spark. This graphic also demonstrates that the metrics produced the fastest and easiest often tell only part of the story.

Google has already found it’s difficult to monetize social media (e.g. purchase of YouTube) and may experience some bumps in their upward trajectory if micro-payment of copyrighted content takes hold. This situation will continue to evolve and Internet users will be watching closely to protect the free search.

I’m left thinking this is one more reason to protect the free press and investigative journalism that could provide in-depth reporting on this very important issue. Is this the tipping point showing the importance of getting the estimated 15K-20K trained reporters back to work? While micro-blogging grows increasingly popular, my guess is micro-payments won’t be embraced with quite the same fervor. I want a good investigative journalist to take the reins on this and let us know the real ramifications and the likely future of copyrighted material.

Questions specifically for public relation pros:
Will micro-payments change how some of you currently use the free alert system?
How will you be affected if Google alerts are forced to change its source list?
Are you prepared to modify your benchmarks to accommodate this change?

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Posted in Copyright, Public Relations, Technology | 2 Comments »

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Steve Shannon
The Empire Strikes BackMark it down in your calendars, PR pros: Monday April 6th is when news media publishers said “enough is enough” with the turmoil shaking their industry and begun to strike back. The pronouncement came at the annual meeting of the Associated Press, a consortium owned by newspapers and other publishers. The course of action?  “… an aggressive effort to track down copyright violators.”

If you’ve read my previous posts, here, here and here, you knew this day was coming. What does it mean for PR professionals? Simply, be careful how you use copyrighted material. A handy primer is the BurrellesLuce white paper, Copyright Compliance: What Every Media Relations Professional Needs to Know, that covers the subject. 

Expect to see the AP pick on some small fry first such as a blogger or two. But beware, a “poster child” big fish may be in the offing as well, to set an example, and get everyone in the land paying attention to copyright and news material, much as the recording and movie industries have done in the past. Don’t forget that the SIIA, another organization where news publishers are heavily involved, brought Knowledge Networks to a $300,000 settlement for violating copyright on both printed and digital news content. That was a fraction of what they could have won in court as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act calls for penalties as high as $50,000 per occurrence.  Remember that cutting and pasting ten entire articles into a clip report is ten occurrences and a potential $500,000 fine.

Of course, BurrellesLuce clients can sleep easy through this latest development.  They know that our small copyright compliance royalty covers them for the internal use of our digitized print clips (under agreement with the AP and thousands of publishers), and that the links and best passages supplied in our BurrellesLuce iMonitor service are copyright compliant (and have no royalty charge either).

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Posted in Copyright, Industry Events, Media Industry, Technology | No Comments »

A Visit with the Copyright Alliance

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Steve Shannon
AllianceOn a recent trip to Washington, D.C., I had the pleasure of visiting with Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance. A two-year old organization, it members – all involved in the creation of original works – include songwriters, photographers, recording artists, graphic designers, and software developers, as well as the owners of motion pictures, videogames, and sports leagues.

My chat with Patrick illuminated for me the forces at work in the world of copyright and what the future will hold.  Of course, given my work at BurrellesLuce, a lot of my questions to him were about newspapers and magazines.

In quizzing Patrick about what’s ahead for the printed media, I learned he sees a continuing online evolution. He believes consumers of that media will see a mixed model of free and paid content, with the horse already being out of the barn on free content. Once publishers secure an ongoing and viable business model, Patrick thinks they will then put more muscle behind copyright enforcement, and will rely on technology to track the use of their material.

Because most news items have a shelf life, Patrick believes they have a lower value to digital pirates. Still, Patrick notes when piracy does take place, it happens in real time. Going forward, this may force publishers to become hyper-vigilant about protecting their copyrights.  As an example, Patrick points out that the content of his own blog on copyright is already being pirated and used to sell ads. Patrick is flattered that his content is considered valuable, as his readership is remarkably high given the weighty nature of its subject matter, but like any publisher, he wants his users to interact with his content in the context of his choosing, in this case the Copyright Alliance website.

Of note, Patrick told me that while copyright law is about 300 years old, one can find many examples of the use of the word piracy related to takings of original works about 400 years ago.  Clearly copyrights and their infringement is an age-old issue.

Lastly, I asked Patrick what he sees on the horizon for the next two to three years in regard to copyright.  Patrick’s first observation was that the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007 (PRO-IP Act) signed into law by President Bush is a significant development for copyright protection and enforcement. While not yet funded, PRO-IP should be soon, putting a cabinet-level intellectual property coordinator in the White House and increasing criminal penalties for trademark and copyright infringement. Patrick also thinks the Department of Justice will add staff to their computer crimes division for the specific purpose of piracy enforcement.

In wrapping up with Patrick, I asked one more question about the news media world and how the “build it and they will come” model needs to change.  His answer was quick, succinct, and noteworthy for public relations professional in this new Media 2.0 world: “Find your audience and move towards them with content.”  Copyrighted content of course.

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Posted in Copyright, Industry Events, Media Industry, Technology | No Comments »

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