Consortium To Share Ad Revenue From Stolen Stories

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."

Comments

sounds like a very reasonable solution

[Presto Vivace]

I wish them well.

Re:sounds like a very reasonable solution

[carlzum]

Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction was "how dare they!", but after reading the article it sounds like a more realistic approach than the AP has taken. "Spam Blogs" republish work with the intent of generating ad revenue. Ad networks should direct that revenue to the authors. It's in their best interest, failing to compensate the authors will push them to take a hardline stance against news aggregators, and ultimately deter them from investing in new content.

Re:sounds like a very reasonable solution

[grcumb]

Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction was "how dare they!", but after reading the article it sounds like a more realistic approach than the AP has taken.

I don't think the solution is bad in principle. I'm sure that in practice, however, it would be terrible.

Among the potential problems:

• Creation of an RIAA-like organisation which, not coincidentally, requires a certain amount of the funds it recoups in order to manage its own operations.
• Legitimacy granted by advertisers to such an organisation would encourage all parties to 'simplify' payments to such 'rights managers'.
• For small blog authors, chasing up these revenues would be onerous. Larger distributors of web content, on the other hand, would benefit from this. Yet another mechanism to keep the small guy in his place.
• Nonetheless, membership in such an organisation (because of course, authors would have to register to be eligible for repayment) would become a requirement.

Put simply, I'm worried about mission creep. A good idea becomes an institution, and we see the little guy suffering once again because large organisations prefer to deal with large organisations.

Most - but not all - organisations handling royalty payments are built in such a way that small fry don't get a fair shake. They have a relatively small voice in policy decisions, and inevitably get shouted down by corporate interests.

This group may claim to speak on behalf of bloggers like me whose content gets copied all the time, but I can't see it working out to my benefit. All I can see is yet another group empowering themselves at my expense.

Re:sounds like a very reasonable solution

[antic]

How? If their revenue dropped 50%, they'd just double their efforts. They're using scrapers, so it costs them nothing to harvest more content.

Look at spam. If the amount of clicking recipients halves, the spammers double their mailing list to compensate as their cost-per-message is still virtually nothing.

It's not the right solution.

advertising tax.. no wait...

[powerspike]

Maybe the RIAA should take a look at them. Give away your goods for free, and get somebody else to pay for it, i don't think the RIAA have though of that one yet have they?
I've had this happen to me previously on a few websites, the easy way to fix it? don't put your entire story into the feeds... seems pretty simple enough, just put in a exert and force them to link back to the original site.

What is it with these organizations lately

[Jane Q. Public]

that are trying (as often as not, illegally) to charge one party for the transgressions of another? If it's a voluntary program, that may be one thing, but otherwise it is just a crock. It is not legally possible to enter into a contract with another party, and thereby obligate a third party without their consent (or even knowledge).

Re:What is it with these organizations lately

[rde]

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:What is it with these organizations lately

[nathan.fulton]

Yes, because the DMCA doesn't give the content owner and other choices...~

Re:What is it with these organizations lately

[Joebert]

Sounds like a damn fine idea to me, with one possible caveat;

You forgot the part where advertising companies start holding earnings for 90 days to make sure none of these requests come in against the publishers funds.

The article I'm guessing doesn't bring that part up, but you know it's bound to happen.

Is it so hard to

[rolfwind]

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?

Re:Is it so hard to

[nathan.fulton]

>I think I want a live person to have to take time out of their day to actually send these things.

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.

Two Evils

[nathan.fulton]

On the one hand, blatant plagiarism for the purpose of generating income is not-cool. On the other hand, I'm not too gung-ho about this idea.

Here's why: The law sucks. It sucks for a reason. Even under the DMCA, there's a process. It may be a POS that needs to be thrown out, but it provides FAR more freedom to publish than this system does. This is the equivalent of the RIAA asking to get all of the advertising revenue generated by all torrent tracking sites, as well as access to the revenues generated by the viruses that were hidden in their works. Seriously, this system is so incredibly easy to exploit:
1) Join the Consortium for Justice and Happy Fun Days
2) publish something
3) encourage others to re-publish it (probably pretty easy -- esp. smaller news sits with specialties, just figure out what they like and fabricate a story)
4) Contact google/yahoo/etc.
5) PROFIT

People will stop ripping off content and start ripping off (very real) advertising income for small and medium sized blogs. Either this happens because of the lack of control, or the entire thing will require a huge bureaucracy that makes it no better or worse than the DMCA -- and so you're not really solving any problems.

It's not a bad idea... I just don't think it will work.

Re:Two Evils

[PopeGumby]

Except its not more information, its just the same information, repeated ad nauseum. Once you have written something, and someone takes a direct copy, how does the average user discern who wrote it, and who copied it?

Splog?

[glasnt]

Why not go all out and say "spist" (spam list), "spost" (spam post) or "spread" (spam thread).

third solution?

[bcrowell]

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:third solution?

[T Murphy]

If the complaining companies submit the pages with new material to search engines as it gets published, the engine could use timestamps to quickly know if it was the first submitted. If you don't actively submit your material and get it timestamped, and it matches something else, you lose to anyone that did. It could go one step further and check the repeat sites for links back to the original. If a site repeatedly has no link it gets buried deeper in search results.

I don't know much about how search engines work so please correct me if I'm saying something unintelligent.

Take permits many; money more.

[v1]

god this reminds me of a quote from a star trek movie...

McCoy: How much and how soon?
Alien: How soon is now. How much is, where?
McCoy: Somewhere in the Mutara sector.
Alien: Oh, Mutara restricted! Take permits many; money more.
McCoy: There aren't gonna be any damned permits! How can you get a permit to do a damned illegal thing? Look, price you name, money I got.

Ahem...

[clinko]

How it works:
"Attributor scans billions of web sites, blogs and social networks on a continuous basis to find copies of your content across the web."

Another example:
Just like when attributor copies another site's design and embeds a remote site's image.

Re:Ahem...

[clinko]

For good measure:

Their Photo vs.

Rihanna's photo

I don't see how this can work

[z80kid]

I don't see how this can work.

If I'm looking at this right, we have three entities involved: The original publisher, the infringing site, and the advertiser who buys space from the infringing site.

Now I sympathize with the original publisher who was ripped off. But his case is against the infringing site - not the advertiser. I can't imagine that the publisher could ever take successful legal action against an advertiser without first taking action against the the actual infringer. That leaves the advertiser mostly in the clear.

So what incentive does the advertiser have to get involved? These publishers are essentially telling them "I want you to pay me instead of your client for each instance where I claim your client ripped me off." That opens up a big legal can of worms for the advertiser, as well as imposing more overhead on his operations. And for what gain to the advertiser?