Consortium To Share Ad Revenue From Stolen Stories 94
Hugh Pickens writes "Erick Schonfeld has an interesting story in TechCrunch about a consortium of publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico that plans to take a new approach towards the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher's work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google's AdSense, and Yahoo. One precedent for this type of approach is YouTube's Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. It may not be the perfect solution but 'it is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices' writes Schonfeld."
Is it so hard to (Score:3, Interesting)
make a crawler. Have it go through all the usual channels (digg/slashdot/all_the_major_aggregated_news sites/etc) comparing text of recent stories to what the linked-to websites list. Have it send DMCA notices automatically based on Who is information.
Then offer them embedded links, infact offer it on the story page itself just like youtube offers embedded lins. It will bring up the text/video with the added feature of automatically providing links to updates on the story and stuff of that nature without the blogger doing anymore work. Ads still be served by the originating news source. Both sides win.
Or is this unimplementable?
third solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
The slashdot summary discusses two hypothetical solutions: (1) Send out thousands of DMCA takedown notices. (2) Negotiate with ad networks for a percentage of ad revenue. I'd suggest (3) fix broken search engines that send users to cut-and-paste sites. I'm really tired of doing searches on search engines and finding hundreds of hits that all turn out to be cut-and-paste pages taken from the same Wikipedia article. They may be perfectly legal, if they comply with Wikipedia's license, and therefore solutions 1 and 2 won't work at all. Google already has various proprietary and secret algorithms for detecting which web sites are trying to game page rank. Shouldn't it be pretty straightforward to come up with a list of thousands of utterly legal, and yet utterly useless, domains that do nothing but cut and paste other people's contents?
Re:What is it with these organizations lately (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not what they're doing; it says this clearly in TFA (and, indeed, the summary). What they're asking for is a cut of the revenues that would be paid by the ad companies to the aggregator. Yes, the ad company would be handing over the cash (or its virtual equivalent), but the cash they'd be handing over would be taken from the account of whomever ran the page.
Sounds like a damn fine idea to me, with one possible caveat; it would legitimise the practise, as they aggregators would essentially be paying for the privilege of doing nothing. One could look at this as an 'everybody wins' situation; the original sites get money, the aggregator gets money, the ad company gets clicks. However, it essentially amounts to 'money for nothing' on the part of the aggregator. It also allows them to say to anyone who complains 'just join the alliance', giving them, if not the moral high ground, then at least a position that isn't below sea level.
Re:Is it so hard to (Score:3, Interesting)
Too late. Lawyers do that work.
>Unless I can have my robo-attorney respond.
In all seriousness, a service that provides "I comply" and "I don't comply because...(generate content based on user input using yes/no questions or check boxes or something)" would be an interesting service -- even if ultimately an unpractical and kinda-stupid way of dealing with notices. Perhaps as an educational tool for people who are not lawyers but are in positions where they have to be able to read and interpret DMCA take down notices and then explain them toe superiors/clients/etc.
Is This Profitable? (Score:1, Interesting)
Are these copy-cat websites actually profitable?
Re:Go after the ad networks (Score:1, Interesting)
Except that now the ad networks and the search engines are the same entity. Oops. You just sued one of your major sources of traffic.
Re:Two Evils (Score:2, Interesting)