Media organisations would have the exclusive right, for a predetermined period, to publish their material online. The draft also considers curtailing fair use, the legal principle that allows search engines to reproduce headlines and links, so long as the use is selective and transformative (as with a list of search results). Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism students to become entrepreneurs at New York’s City University, says this sounds like an attempt to protect newspapers more than journalism.
Why do news corporations merit such protection? I understand the Econ 101 explanation for copyright laws (and wrote a cringeworthy paper on the subject in high school). It boils down to incentivizing production of intangibles by lending them some of the properties of tangibles (i.e. excludability) to address some of the causes of market failure (i.e. freeriding).
Copyright laws, like any other laws, restrict the freedom of society, and therefore can only be justified if they also protect society. That was the original intent of copyright law-- to protect society from the underproduction of socially beneficial works. The Copyright Clause in the U.S. Constitution authorizes Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." So the purpose was promoting science and useful arts, while the method was granting exclusive rights. But the rhetoric has changed. What was once the method is taken for the purpose. For example, Ayn Rand advocates copyrights as protecting "a man’s right to the product of his mind" (rather than a society's right to progress). And what about these newspaper "protections" being considered? Are they protecting society from harmful underproduction?
First, let me note some distinctions to bear in mind. There are products associated with news, but news is not a product. News itself--what happens in the world--is the story of humanity and is not subject to markets, nor, a fortiori, to market failure. Newspapers and newspaper delivery, for instance are products (the first a good, the second a service). More generally, communication of the news is a product, often entailing a combination of goods and services. Underproduced communication of the news would indeed be a social harm.
Communicating the news once required access to a printing press and physical delivery of newspapers. A journalist alone could not very practically communicate the news, given the high capital requirements and distribution costs. News corporations formed out of practical necessity, and coordinated the efforts of journalists, editors, photographers, printers, etc. to produce a periodical that could then be mass delivered. Physical limitations on communicative materials also required the news media to play a gatekeeping role, determining what news was fit to print in the limited space and also maintaining some semblance of credibility. So communicating the news required corporations, and corporations require incentives.
But now, a journalist (or anyone with knowledge of a news occurrence) does have a practical way of communicating the news. The capital requirements for communication are drastically different with the Internet. The coordinating role played by news corporations is no longer as necessary. Many functions of traditional news corporations can be crowdsourced now that traditional barriers to collaboration such as time and geography have been overcome. The need for mass media brands to signal credibility is reduced now that authors can easily link to other articles, multimedia, and primary sources, and people can comment directly on articles and discuss dubious claims, and even award reputation points. Plus the general public is better equipped to check credibility for themselves (as I did, for example, by finding FTC documents after reading the first news article), especially as digital literacy rises.
Lower news communication costs, by challenging mass media hegemony, have enabled niche news production. This actually increases news coverage for everyone, and additionally can bring hope of social justice to sparse populations or interest groups who have traditionally been ignored by the mass media. The example I have in mind is people with rare types of disabilities. In place of gatekeeping, a number of sites have taken to gatewatching, helping audiences navigate the vastness of news channels. Gatewatchers publicize, rather than publish, news, by providing headlines, summaries, and links to stories they deem relevant or noteworthy. Gatewatching also occurs when we "like" or "digg" articles, link to them in our blogs, and share them on our social networking sites (like when Daniel called my attention to the article on copyrighting).
In another age, government intervention via copyright law did mitigate underproduction of news communication. But the proposed strengthening of copyright laws is unneccessary, as news communication is at no risk of being underproduced. In fact, if the government is going to intervene, better to do so by increasing broadband access than by propping up newspaper corporations.
