Idea Lab

AP News Registry Aims at Most Flagrant Infringers

by J.D. Lasica
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry. The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components: • All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc. • The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted...

• September 21, 2009
• 6 comments

The Sins of Princes...

by Tony Shawcross
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following the story of Prince's copyright battles for over a year, and found the latest development noteworthy enough to call attention to. My interest began with Prince and Universal targeting YouTube, fan sites, and housewives for a number of debatable copyright infringements in 2007. It got some good media attention at first, with ABC News doing a great piece in Oct. 2007. But although the attention on the subject has waned in the media, Prince and UMG have kept up their plight, and the latest fallout is the death of one of the oldest and most popular fan...

• February 5, 2009
• 2 comments

New Liability Insurance Program for Bloggers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here is a simple, but often ignored, truth: if you publish online, whether it's a news article, blog post, podcast, video, or even a user comment, you open yourself up to potential legal liability. It doesn't matter whether you are a professional journalist, hockey-mom, or an obscure blogger, if you post it, you'll need to be prepared for the legal consequences. So how big are the legal risks? It depends on what you publish and how you go about doing so. If you publish a blog about cute cats, for example, your risks are going to be lower than...

• September 23, 2008
• 1 comment

AP Takes on Drudge Retort Over Copyright Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, the Associated Press ("AP") sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material. The Drudge Retort is a community site similar to Digg and Reddit, allowing its users to...

• June 16, 2008
• 10 comments

Copyright and the Demise of Newspapers

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive compensation for their investment in quality reporting. While I think he gives too little credit to citizen...

• May 8, 2008
• 3 comments

How Do We Deal with Stolen Content?

by Gail Robinson
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity. So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our...

• May 1, 2008
• 2 comments

Primer on Copyright Liability and Fair Use

by David Ardia
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

As a lead up to next week's launch of the Citizen Media Law Project's Legal Guide, we are putting up longer, substantive blog posts on various subjects covered in the guide. This post, which discusses copyright and fair use in the context of citizen media, is the second in our series of legal primers. The first addressed the subject of immunity and liability for third-party content under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Because the primer is too long for me to republish here, I've included just a summary.  If you are interested in reading more, the entire...

• January 25, 2008
• No comments

Locative Media and Geo-tagging the Delta Blues Continues

by Leslie Rule
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our geo-tagging of the Blues Trail in the Mississippi Delta continues, albeit from afar. We've been deep in research. Using new media/online research tools, mostly archives and libraries that have been digitized--giving us the opportunity to spend all night wandering through history with unstoppable imagination, horror at the deeds of the past, but also with a renewed sense of excitement and wonder. The images I am most drawn to are the old maps. Our amazing project researcher, Ann Bennett, is deep into the process, leading us to sources such as * Archives of African American Music * Blues Archive at...

• November 2, 2007
• No comments