DRM for news? Inside the AP's plan to "wrap" its content
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is actually quite comparable to Ted Nelsons' project Xanadu (or at least parts of it).
The basic idea behind xanadu was that information could be re-cited as often as you wanted but the originator would get a slice of the cake.
The web is the opposite, it's a total free-for-all with the spammers and the parasites being on the same level as the originators of the content. Nelson saw it differently.
Early attempts at something like the web in Europe (minitel in France and videotext in the netherlands and germany) tried to charge 'by the page' for the content, but this seriously limited the amount of information available. Information providers could set a price on their information and the 'links' would display the price prior to activation. Billing was done through the telco.
If every web link came with a price attached I think it would have never gotten off the ground the way it did. Still, there are some good elements in that philosophy and I'm sure that in the long run 'for pay' links and some kind of citation mechanism will find their way back in to the web, simply because they are useful and because there is much demand for it (from the content providers side).
One potential way to realize this today is by setting up a gateway that deals with pay-per-view content where information providers could host their data and a plug-in based viewer (flash or something like it) that unlocks the content if the client has enough credits and confirms they want to see it.
I hope all of this makes sense :)
So does it seem that Xanadu would solve what AP is trying to do?
This is not to be disrespectful to Ted Nelson, it's just that the good bits are going to be recylced even if the grand vision won't be.
Some elements from Xanadu would solve the problems the AP is trying to address but I highly doubt that it would be commercially feasible without some kind of collusion between all the news providers. After all, as long as one of them stays free that one will end up with all the customers in their basket.
It's a free market, and the market deals harshly with those that try to sell lemons while the neighbours find a way to give them away and still make a profit.
Microformats are the bridge by which we're going to get to the truly Semantic Web.
I think rumors of AP's suicide/death are rather overblown, and they're just looking for a way to share without giving away the farm. Of course, they might have done better to use something like a creative commons license and choose terms that would encapsulate their legitimate commercial interest. On the other hand there's no ML standard for CC licensing that I know of.
-- Gavin O'Reilly, Chairman, Automated Content Access Protocol
If you don't want people using the content you created, you shouldn't be in the content creation business.
The problem that news companies suffer that makes this a significantly different problem for them rather than a company like the RIAA is that journalists get paid by the company as a primary source of income, journalists have to get sent places which costs the company money, and the company's primary source of revenue is the output of the journalists. For a second lets forget print media ever existed, in the current state of the web where media such as this is demanded by users to be free this is a failing business because of extravagant costs, and almost no profits. Why print media is a failing is because less people buy print and more people read it online.
There are players who beat the market by having a niche audience, low costs, and a high price, ie the Economist. Unlike the NY Times or AP they didn't have to send several photographers and journalists to China several times for pre, during, and post Olympics. While I don't necessarily agree with this business model, an exchange of cash has to exist somewhere, finding where such an exchange is most acceptable is a another story.
When the cost of printing collapses (to use the expression from Clay Shirky), the barrier to entry disappears, and the value derived from scarcity disappears with it.
AP's scheme amounts to a technical and/or legal attempt to reimpose an artificial scarcity so it can once again sell at a premium.
Their scheme is doomed.
That's only a problem if your business model depends on users paying for these things - i.e. if your business model depends on scarcity that doesn't exist.
If they would only stop being precious for a minute, the newsmedia would recognize that they're already familiar with the idea of making money from sources other than the actual content consumers. After all, it was newspapers that popularized the revenue-from-advertising model in the first place, a model that allowed them to deliver newspapers very cheaply (sometimes freely) to their readers.
The smartest thing AP and other newsmedia can do is abandon their micropayment pipe dreams and start getting creative about new ways to leverage their assets for revenue.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_new...
That means either:
1) the corporate newsmedia will come up with some new revenue stream by discovering or developing some new source of value from their assets, or
2) they will fail.
Look at Google. They started out as a search company. With no real idea how to generate revenue, they came up with a way to aggregate hyperlinks across websites to produce surprisingly helpful page results for keyword searches.
It was the gargantuan data set they managed to accumulate over the course of indexing the internet and generating search results that finally gave them the revenue stream they needed.
Google is now an advertising company. They generate revenue by selling contextual advertising embedded in web pages (they get website owners to agree to this advertising by sharing some of their revenue).
That's a profoundly creative way of leveraging assets to generate revenue by providing a scarce, valuable service: scarce because only Google has the infrastructure, data, analytical expertise and market reach to provide it; and valuable because advertisers gain more revenue from increased sales than it costs them to buy Google ads.
The newsmedia, until now, have been mainly in the advertising business, in which the exercise of gathering, reporting and distributing the news served as a mechanism for attracting advertising revenue (in much the same way that indexing the internet and providing search results is Google's mechanism for attracting advertising revenue).
The media were never particularly in the business of selling the news to their readers. Their customers were advertisers, not readers; and what they sold was not news but the eyeballs of their readers.
That business model is now dying. Some media firms - either existing firms that can change their stripes or some new firm that discovers and exploits an opportunity - will find a new business model in which they sell something scarce and valuable to someone willing to pay for it.
Again, those media firms that fail to do this will fail.
If you've got an hour or so, there's a really entertaining lecture by Cory Doctorow on the HN front page right now:
What I'm talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don't even comment on it. And it happens way more than most people realize.
If people don't realize this is happening, how can it be a problem? If a blog without readers violates copyright, does it hurt the AP?
However, if you've used Google News for a long time after a while you notice that there's a lot of no-original-content websites masquerading as news outlets, not unlike the domain squatters with 'search result' pages for high-ranking searches. In my opinion it's a kind of black-hat SEO.
Try looking at a news story in GN and you'll see that the top story has maybe '5000 similar stories'. The first page or two will be related or fully rewritten stories, but if you go past the first 100 results you'll see a lot of junk websites that just host the top 20 news stories and monetize them with adwords. They may only make $10 a day that way, but it's diluting AP's brand a bit in the process.