copyright

What’s Stealing?

An interesting little tale has come up today, starting with Lance Wiggs complaining that a site is syndicating his blog headlines. He labels it stealing and discussion ensues.

My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here…

Firstly, in my defense, I left Stuff because of it’s content. Now the stories I want to read are aggregated with Google News. I still visit Stuffs site regularly to read the stories I want.

I would also argue that Jobs.org.nz (and by extention Google News, digg, techmeme and any other aggregator) are not stealing content. They’re using a headline and a small excerpt of the post (permitted under copyright “fair dealing”), and giving a perma-link to the content hosted on his blog. If they were using his entire post as content, referenced or not, I’d understand his anger and would agree that was “stealing content” because that would be copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Jobs.org.nz is obviously a questionable looking site, and I’m not saying that Lance is beyond his rights to ask his feed to be removed. I probably would as well – I wouldn’t want to be associated with that site as it has potential to damage your brand.

Dylan said:

Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.

I don’t understand how he came to this conclusion. Google uses a headline and sometimes a 20 character excerpt. If you want to read the story you have to link out to the publishers site (except for AP content which Google pays for syndication).

Dylan Said:

In conclusion I’d argue that Google News takes traffic and eye balls away from the publisher…thus reducing their revenues. If I were a publisher I’d be nervous.

I would agree that Google News takes eyeballs away from publishers front pages, but that’s simply because Google do a better job at providing a portal for content the user wants to see.

And of course publishers are nervous. So were the other industries when they realised that they had to change.

We’re entering a stage in our society where consumers want to pick and choose what they consume. The music industry is realising that some people don’t want to pay for an album for a few good songs (iTunes, other digital services). The television industry is realising some don’t want want to watch the endless river of shitty reality TV shows to get to the good stuff (TVNZ on demand, Hulu). The print industry must realise that some won’t want to wade through their quagmire of crap to get to the stories which are important to them.

Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Bill

photo credit: hugh07

Well, it seems this one flew in just under my radar…

New Zealand has passed an amendment to the Copyright Bill to include “New Technologies”, which refers to the digital medium.

Most alarming in this bill is the inclusion of the DMCA-like offence of owning “Digital lockpicks” to free the data which you already own. The new clause makes it illegal to circumvent a copyright protection, even for personal use such as format-shifting (although there are limited format-shifting provisions in the bill). Since I can’t seem to find a copy of the actual text, it’s unknown how this will affect products such as region-free DVD players and the like.

Considering I have personally circumvented copyright protection using a black marker, a shift key and a line out in the past we shall see if this law is as “effective” as the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At the same time, I’m happy they didn’t take some of the more draconian provisions from the DMCA such as the infamous “takedown notice”.

Hopefully I can get a look at it shortly.

Update: It’s worse than I thought, Notice & Takedown provisions are there in full force. Herald.