The Myth of Parasitic Bloggers, and other consequences
Glenn Greenwald at Salon has an excellent article up on “The Myth of the Parasitic Bloggers.” We normally wouldn’t lead a post with a direct link and a reading recommendation, but if you’re interested in the current debate between newspapers and new media, read it.
He notes rightly that the difference between mainstream media and bloggers is that when bloggers quote a mainstream media outlet, they usually link back. The mainstream media on the other hand regularly find stories online, and rarely ever credit back. On the low scale this is the lifting of a core story or idea, which is then built upon with mostly original content. At the extreme, this is verbatim plagiarism of bloggers, as demonstrated with the TPM/ Maureen Dowd affair.
What Greenwald doesn’t explore though is the parasitic nature of the mainstream media and PR, a relationship I referenced in a previous post. The statistics show that up to 80% of MSM stories are sourced through PR, a relationship that has more than its fair share of cut and paste. In my past, when I was doing media for an Australian Member of Parliament, my proudest moments were when members of the local media would actually run our media verbatim; that is, without even bothering to edit the media release before publishing it as a legitimate story. But even when they weren’t totally lazy, chunks of what I had written (often in the name of my employer) constantly appeared cut and paste in media outlets. It probably goes without saying that media playing ball like this is a key objective of PR. But from the perspective of looking at the media industry from the outside, this parasitic relationship undermines every newspaper hack, head, or industry lawyer who claims that bloggers are parasitic, and that mainstream media isn’t.
These relationships though have a far more serious consequence given what the newspaper industry is currently pushing in the United States, and that’s the extension of the “hot news” doctrine to facts. As argued as recently as last week, the industry is pushing for not only content itself to be covered by copyright (it already is), but the facts of the story as well. The argument is that the outlet who publishes the story first should have exclusive rights to it.
But who published first? As Greenwald notes, the mainstream media takes from new media without attribution. Will those rights be extended to first rights when the story came from new media? It would be fair to suggest that the newspaper industry wouldn’t be in favor of that. The core problem comes back to facts: are facts copyrightable? Should it be illegal for anyone to discuss a story around a water cooler? I’d note that we are not talking about wholesale content theft; and on that count, the law is already clear. But facts are facts, and they do not belong to the newspaper industry any more than they do to blogs. Newspapers among themselves write about stories that originated on other newspapers (often without attribution), because facts aren’t subject to copyright.
One thing is clear: if what the newspaper industry gets what it wants with the extension of the hot news doctrine, newspapers won’t be the winners, only lawyers will be.
