Mixed Media: Changing copyright law won’t save newspapers

Please see articles:

1. (Main Article) http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/06/30/mixed-media-changing-copyright-law-wont-save-newspapers/

2.http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/06/the_future_of_n.html

3.http://www.cleveland.com/schultz/index.ssf/2009/06/tighter_copyright_law_could_sa.html

4. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/the-ap-hot-news-and-hotheaded-blogs/

In this article, Jeff Bercovici, unravels to us the prospect of re-examining and altering copyright law for the purpose of saving newspaper and news-reporting industries from suffering from frequent copyright infringers and to keep news-delivery in the hands of those who work so tediously to gather it.

Over the past few decades, mainly because of the availability of internet posting services and blogging, newspapers have endured incalculable wounds that produced constant leaks of information to the public without their consent. Hence, with the reality that some identities are capable of accessing newspaper articles either before or after the newspaper articles are officially available to the public eye and illegally posting summaries of them on “aggregation sites” severely hurts the newspaper industry because such copyright-infringing activity steals a newspaper’s sole responsibility to diffuse accumulated news into the national or local community.

Further, in order to deal with copyright issues in relation to news copying and distribution, Bercovici, through the ideas of other scholars and columnists such as Richard Posner and Connie Schultz, introduces the proposed concept that perhaps a change in copyright laws such as providing “a 24-hour window in which a given piece of news would be exclusive to the outlet that broke it” might halt illegal summarizing of news on popular blogs and other conduits of dispersion. In the same vein, such a change in copyright enforcement might prevent newspaper industries from losing as much time and money, but according to Bercovici and Jeff Jarvis’s point of view, such a copyright alteration will do little to preserve newspapers from “falling.” In fact, Jarvis asserts that “some forms of news such as Michael Jackson’s death” are definitely not going to hold back millions of post and blogs about the incident no matter how much newspaper’s would want to withhold such information and claim copyright to it.

Hence, based on Jeff Bercovinci’s account, it is fairly evident that in today’s wired society news agencies and newspaper owners experience many financial loses because, although copyrighted, news articles can still be spread around the word in a matter of seconds through online posts. Furthermore, at the end of his article, Bercovinci stated that the “24-hour rule” is a concept that may not accomplish as much as it hopes to “to save newspapers.” Such a declaration is reasonable because, in reality, having or not having a “24-hour exclusive” to protect newspapers is not going to prevent illegal summarizing of newspaper articles online. Yes, their will be a slightly larger risk for copyright infringers to copy news articles on posts but it seems that it will not be enough to entirely stop them. Thus, in order to create a stronger wall of protection against unauthorized copying and summarizing of news and newspaper articles more serious measures have to be taken to preserve the time and money news-gathering agencies spend to deliver news to our society.

– S. Petrov