Steve Shannon
Mark 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).