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EU Publishers Want a Law To Control Online News
suraj.sun writes with news that European publishers are also seeking ways to "protect" their content from the big bad intertubes. Their rant, termed the "Hamburg Declaration," asks the government to step in with a legislative fix. "Most of the statements in the relatively short declaration, which will surely take its place among thousands of other European declarations on intellectual property and other matters that have come out over the past few years, hinge on the idea that 'universal access to news' does not equal 'free.' In this respect, the publishers want to maintain the democratic ideal of a 'fourth estate' that provides news to an informed citizenry, while simultaneously restricting access to that news to those who can pay for it directly. What sets this declaration apart from the other Hamburg declarations out there, or from the various Geneva declarations or Berlin declarations, is that this one is intended to give the publishers' favorite solution to the news-stealing problem, the Automated Content Access Protocol, the force of law."
people will gravitate towards free. If they go pay... people will just go elsewhere its simple as that, law or no law.
There Can Be Only One...
1. Don't put it on the web
2. Learn how to use robots.txt
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
I hope Obama doesn't buy into this stuff. The "fourth estate" has enough clout already.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
... 2.5 hours later ( http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/13/0531215/Traditional-News-Media-Lead-Blogs-By-25-Hours?from=rss )
Hamburg Declaration:
"I'll have mine with cheese and bacon."
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Sorry.
I'd settle for news organizations doing a better job of reporting the news, and stop the spinning and opinions. I'd pay for real news with no bias.
Just the facts as best you can report them please. Leave your opinions at home.
This isn't about free web content, or copyright.
The newspapers are trying to establish ownership of the underlying INFORMATION, not just the words they use to convey that information.
Newspapers who actually go out and "get" news are trying to establish control over that information so that those who re-report do not compete directly with the original report.
This isn't about copyright, it is about establishing a new 'estate' of IP which establishes ownership over directly sourced/reported information.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Vampires, sadly, have nothing to do with it. Although, most articles on DRM make me want to impale someone, so I suppose there's a connection.
I wouldn't go that far. The (much less ironic) observation is that different governments have different priorities and their policing tactics reflect this.
China doesn't much care about bourgeois western "intellectual property", so you can send spam hawking pirated software all you want. Send out invites for your next falun gong meeting or democracy protest, though, and you'll discover what 'so called "unfree"' really means.
The US is quite solid on speech that doesn't upset major corporations, and is an excellent spot for saying mean things about religious figures, expressing all kinds of fun political theories, hosting your "handguns I have known and loved" archive or whatever. Not such a good place to host "WareZ and DeCSS 4LyFE!", though.
There are plenty of locations(though exactly where they are tends to drift over time) where the state is weak enough, or enough in need of foreign investment/aid, that(as long as you maintain a polite disinterest in local politics, and pay the occasional bribe) they won't really bother you at all. Pretty much any government will come down on you like a ton of bricks in response to some class of actions on your part and pretty much any government has another class of activities of which it approves, or simply doesn't care.
Help me Slashdot! Me and Steve Jobs were jacking each other off
Disgraceful. It should be "Steve Jobs and I".
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The big dogs like google could start charging these guys to index their precious. I wish they would have done something like that rather than cave into AP, etc, for just quoting little snippets to have *something* to show where this news link was coming from. Do it on a case by case basis, the various news websites want their news paywall to be indexed, they should pay for that professional servgice, if they don't throw up a paywall, then they get indexed for free, like today. Ball is in the news orgs court then when it comes to what they think things are worth or not.
I have mixed feelings about google, but sometimes I think they are too nice and cave in too readily. It can't be that much fun to be the biggest of the big dogs and not get to bite some ass once in awhile.
While that is true for many American newspapers it's not the same for European newspapers. And Europeans read more newspapers than the average US American (according to the int'l newspaper association).
Then again Europe is not a country and with over 47 countries there are a whole lot of variety in newspapers (and sources).
In my own country newspapers are seen as an important public function and are subsidized to support independent, varied and local reporting. It's given to support political views and cultural issues such as publishing in the regional language (official language, not dialect). Small, regional newspapers are seen as part of the democratic foundation of my country. I suppose that's why my countrymen and I read the most newspaper per capita in the world.
It probably doesnt hurt that norway is dark and encased in ice for a huge chunk of the year.
Nope. That's a simple and untrue depiction of my country. If you knew anything about Norway you would know that there is a great deal of variety from arctic Finnmark county to the summer paradise of our southern coastal regions. It's a very long country. You seem to think there's some kind of total winter darkness here? That's only in the far north, the majority of the country experiences four regular seasons. And the winters vary a lot, some regions don't even experience snow.
You do realize we do not have polar bears in our streets? The last weeks we've had great sunny days with temperatures above 86 F (30 C) - 95 F (35 C). Winters can be cold of course.
In fact the major factors behind newspaper readership in Norway is the high levels of education, grassroots political and organizational involvement. It helps living in a country where the majority of the population is college educated [for generations], and education is free. Even the least academic workers attend vocational schools here.
Also volunteering and involvement in organizations from sports clubs to the Red Cross/Lions/Kiwanis is extremely common. Everyone takes part. It helps create debate and involvement on issues and politics from local to national levels. Remember, it's a "socialist" country.
And yes, this is annoying to me as well. I think that if there is even one penny of public tax money that goes to the researchers who write these articles, that the entire paper be free to view in its entirety. Those academic paywalls are *most annoying*, especially when even the summaries/abstracts suck and don't tell much. I try to not even tease myself anymore and just use sites like PlOS, etc. Google should have a way to not show paywalls on request. You can do that with the negative modifiers with your search, -elsevier.com, like that, but it's a chore.
On a side issue, I'd go further and say similar for patents, any public monies used, the patents become public domain.