Laws That Could Save Newspaper Chains (Updated)

This morning there’s an op-ed in the Washington Post from a pair of media lawyers that is simply stunning in its ignorance of the Internet, history, business, economics, the newspaper business, and blackletter law among other things in what I can only interpret as a mad grab for legal fee. Their proposals for “saving journalism” include:

“Updating copyright law” by restricting search engines

But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts — republishing a quote to comment on it, for example — is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.

This is emphatically not the way search engines work. Search engines read and analyze web pages. They don’t take them. Some do but that’s already a violation of the law, it’s just not enforced. If reading is taking, then we’re all doing it and by reading a newspaper you’d be engaging in an illegal act. Will Rogers, pictured above, made a vaudeville act out of reading snippets of newspaper articles on stage and commenting on them. Was that illegal? Should it have been?

Enact the “hot news” doctrine into federal law

Under such a provision not only the form of a story would become the property of its publisher, the story itself would become its property. If the state of present law is any guide, it would remain the private property of the publishing organization, effectively, forever. This is completely at odds for anything resembling freedom of speech or thought.

Eliminate ownership restrictions

This is to confuse cause and effect. Large media organizations growing through excessive leverage are causing the crisis in print journalism. Bigger media organizations won’t solve the problem.

Subsidize news production via tax policy

Like all other federal subsidies this would give advantages to large organizations at the expense of small ones. I’m sure it would be a windfall for media attorneys, however.

Remove antitrust proscriptions on newspaper organizations sharing resources

This sounds like a formula for abuse to me. Stop me if I’m wrong: haven’t the newspapers been shrinking their staffs since before there was an Internet? I seem to recall lots of newspapers closing their foreign offices, cutting back on their newsrooms forty years ago. How does allowing them to further contract help them survive? I can see how it might allow for some short-term profits for newspaper chains.

We need to distinguish among three completely different but interrelated things: journalism, newspapers, and newspaper chains. When somebody goes to their neighborhood association meeting and reports on it on their blog, that’s journalism just as surely as what is printed in the pages of The New York Times. Why are protections suited only to large newspaper chains saving journalism? It’s just saving large newspaper chains.

Update

Matthew Yglesias comments:

This op-ed seems designed to push whole new frontiers in bad policy. The idea is that in order to save newspapers, congress should (a) grant newspapers an anti-trust exemption so they can collude and fix prices and (b) make search engine indexing of whole web pages a violation of copyright laws. Thus equipped to extract monopoly rents from readers and Google alike, the thinking goes, the news business can be saved.

Jeff Jarvis characterizes the plan as “dangerously wrong-headed lobbying from media lawyers”.

So, who sent them? Judging by the firm’s web page, I’d say the Society of Professional Journalists, the Tribune Co., and The Hearst Corporation. I’m sure they have our best interests at heart.