Some Suggestions For The AP, Care Of The Music Industry
Here we go again. Another major content creator is threatening to sue internet companies after years of having them nip at its heels by repurposing or stealing sizeable chunks of its proprietary content. In considering the challenges that the Associated Press faces in its new quest to go after sites that use its content without consent, it’s hard not to look for lessons in the music industry’s experiences over the past decade.
As our own Staci Kramer pointed out yesterday, the AP now begins the tricky dance of trying to track the piracy of its content and suing the perpetrators without looking like an evil empire set on squashing free expression. Using the music industry’s battle with the internet as a jumping-off point, three important questions arise for the AP to consider:
—How do you possibly track all that content? As Staci pointed out, all the tags in the world are not going to ensure that every piece of content is safe. Many bloggers just copy and paste the text of AP reports so there would have to be some kind of search crawling tool created to look for language that matches AP story text (you can see programmers across the world roll their eyes from here). Ultimately the AP likely is focused mostly on the easier-to-find mid-tier sites that use their content since the most money is to be recouped from them. But not being able to manage all the re-purposing of content that takes place on the legions of smaller blogs will still feel like death by a thousand cuts – just ask the music industry, which has seen enormous amounts of money lost to individuals pulling music from P2P sites around the world.
—Is it smart to follow the “sue-then-negotiate-tough-terms” model? The music industry spent much of 2004 to 2008 suing websites – from video aggregators and social networks to blogs that helped people create playlists or find music across the web – and the AP indicated it intends to do the same. But look what happened to many of the sites that the music industry ultimately came to terms with in the hopes of earning millions. Many are now on the block; reports have circulated over the past few weeks that such formerly high-flying internet darlings as iLike and imeem are shopping themselves for a distressed sale. SpiralFrog already went dark after its search. If the AP isn’t careful, it could put the very partners it would like to make money from out of business.
—Why not experiment with different business models that allow small sites to use content and the AP to still make some money? The music industry hasn’t made much money from licensing content to internet companies, as evidenced by the fact that many are fighting hard for better terms as the licenses renew. The AP may avoid the same disappointment if it experimented a little with it own business model before taking the “sit-back-and-wait-for-partner-checks-to-arrive” approach. It could, for example, incentivize sites to pay a small fee for their articles rather than steal them by adding valuable features like search optimization in the text or hosted web video that sites can include with the article. Yes, the devil is in the details and piracy would still exist, but the AP may find that it is making enough money to stomach some piracy, which clearly is not currently the case.
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