Last year a fuss broke out in the US when the Associated Press talked about making bloggers pay for quoting any of its stories - and using as few as five words.
At issue was the principle of 'fair use' and whether bloggers were actually doing the AP a favour by cross promoting its content. The reaction was predictable, for example: "AP sets up a toll booth for bloggers citing its stories", until AP backed down (kind of).
Fast forward a year and a body here in the UK called the Newspaper Licensing Agency is doing something that makes the AP's moves look positively benign. It is thinking of charging agencies and their clients for sending around coverage links. That's right, if I want to send a URL from a newspaper website, I will need to pay a yearly fee.
The NLA represents Britain's newspapers and hands out licenses allowing organisations (in practice press cuttings services, marketing agencies, marketing departments) to legally copy articles. Every year we cough up and we get a license in return.
I can just about accept why, with more and more newspaper content appearing online only, the charge also extends to me and my clients cutting and pasting articles from the web (or taking screen grabs) and sending them around.
But charging me to send links? Let's just think about that for a second. That's something millions of people do every day, it's kind of core to how the Web works. For that reason I'm also not even sure this scheme can be enforced.
Twitter good / Email bad
I'm coming to this a few days late, but that has the benefit of seeing what the NLA had to say to the back-lash. The PR Bristol blog has a good run down of the debate in the comments section, including a few responses from an unnamed NLA representative.
The NLA calls the links issue a 'red herring'. It says that because as part of my job I read its members' websites and then share that content, I should pay, with the delivery method being irrelevant.
In other words, it doesn't deny that it's a case of cash for links.
It also says that "it will not apply to Twitter and social bookmarking sites." So wait. I send a client a link by email and it costs money. But I send them the same link on a Twitter DM (which gets forwarded onto email), or via Delicious, and it's free. Reckon this proposal has a few holes in it?
What about if I send it from my personal email? You know, Dirk Singer just happens to send a 'friend' an interesting link! Or what happens when, as Stephen Waddington of Speed Communications points out, we compile feeds via services such as Netvibes, a service both our agencies use extensively. Does that cost money? How about URL shorteners like bit.ly as that's indirect?
And oh btw, this only applies to UK newspaper websites. I can carry on sending around links from the New York Times or Sydney Morning Herald to my heart's content - and may well do that, as these days no one is restricted to national paper websites when sourcing general industry news or trends.
From my site logs, I know that 2/3 of visitors come from outside the UK, and I imagine that's even higher for Social Media Today where this post is also being published. As a result, I'm hoping that this issue gets a bit of a wider airing as there is a fundamental principle at stake.
Which is: Is it right to charge me for pointing someone else to a website where the content is free anyway, and which makes its money by exposing those same visitors to advertising?
Last year in response to the Associated Press furore, The Online Marketer in the US had this to say:
"In the era of Google juice, link love, and a wealth of online information, the AP chose the path of restriction, as though this greediness would result in keeping all of the information under their roof.
"It took only 24 hours for the back-peddling to begin and it now appears that they will wisely drop the call for restrictions. They had the opportunity to engage their readership, even empower the bloggers and other outlets who were distributing their content free of charge, but they trotted out the lawyers instead."
Wise words and ones the NLA might want to consider.- NYT Tests Online Pay Scenarios On Print Subscribers (paidcontent.org)
- Would You Pay $5 a Month to Read the New York Times Online? (gawker.com)
- A.P. Moving to Halt Use of Newspaper Articles on Web Sites (nytimes.com)
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