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

[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.

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.

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.

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?

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.