Buzzmachine vs. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Jeff Jarvis takes on Connie Schultz, columnist for The Cleveland Plain Dealer. Schultz wants a re-writing of copyright law allowing newspapers to keep stories exclusive for a 24-hour period before others can reprint or link to them. Jarvis begs to differ, and points out that Schultz is the wife of Senator Sherrod Brown. It goes downhill from there.

First note well that Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown as she calls on her newspapers and employer (my former employer, Advance Publications) and fellow columnists to influence Congress to remake copyright. She should be registered as a lobbyist. No joke.

Schultz says that David Marburger, an alleged First Amendment attorney for her paper, and his economics-professor brother, Daniel, have concocted their own dangerous thinking, proposing the copyright law be changed to insist that a newspaper’s story should appear only on its own web site for the first 24 hours before it can be aggregated or retold.

Incredible. So if the Plain Dealer reported exclusively that, say, the governor had just returned from a tryst with a Argentine lady, no one else could so much as talk about that for 24 hours. A First Amendment lawyer said this.

Schultz responded in the comments …

My basic argument is that news organizations should be able to recoup their investment of time, energy and resources before their work product is grabbed by aggregators who pay little or nothing to these originators of news coverage. I have no beef with Google News, for example, which posts a headline and a link to the original story. My objection is to aggregators who post such significant rewrites or summaries that readers to their sites lose any interest in going to the original stories. Nor am I arguing that the copyright exists in perpetuity. I suggested a 24-hour window – and this is up for debate, of course – to allow the originators of the coverage to exploit the full commercial value of their product. Hardly a dangerous proposition.

Jarvis fired back, then sent a press inquiry to Brown’s office wanting to know his position on his wife’s column. Got to love the internet.

Well, you are lobbying Congress and you cannot ignore your uncomfortable position. I’m quite serious: You should register and disclose as a lobbyist. Read your column again. You are trying to influence Congress. Whether your husband is a sponsor of this effort at changing copyright law is irrelevant. Will he vote on it? Will he recuse himself? What is his stand? I want answers to those questions. Will you and he provide them?

You do not deal with the substance of my argument at all. News when it is news is fact and fact in discussion is not subject to the protection you seek to bring to it. Links to newspapers’ news benefit the newspapers.

I suggest you start by studying the new realities of the internet and try to understand how to take advantage of that rather than protect against it and the future.

And I question the credentials of Mr. Marburger, esq., for good reason as he is seeking to protect the business of dying newspapers, such as yours, over the rights of the people in the First Amendment.

I mean what i say: Your argument and that of the Marburgers is outright dangerous to the First Amendment and the future of journalism.

Here’s what Jarvis fired to Brown:

Please consider this a press inquiry:I want to know Sen. Brown’s stand on his wife’s column in the Plain Dealer on attempting to rewrite copyright law to give newspapers a 24-hour period of exclusivity on the news they report.

Does the senator support this legislation?

What will the senator vote on this legislation?

Will the senator recuse himself from voting on this legislation, considering his wife’s role in lobbying Congress on the issue?

Is his wife registered as a lobbyist?

I might as well quote as much of this while I still can (Ok, just joking).

Truth is, newspapers need a model for profit on the internet. Heck, everyone needs a model. Getting traffic is extremely difficult and making money off that traffic is even more difficult. Just ask Floyd or Rufus about the millions they’ve made off Google and Amazon ads on this site. A site bringing in 1,000 uniques a day will still lose money over the long run. These facts are no different for newspaper sites, which not take an army to run, but an army of writers to feed continually with content. The economy and technology are taking the biggest bite out of the group filling the content, supplying a newspaper/site with its heart. A cyclical cycle of hell.

As much as I like Jarvis, I find his First Amendment haranguing a bit dubious. Shouldn’t newspapers be allowed the same rights granted other creators and manufacturers of the products they offer? It gets into the entire debate of peer-to-peer, fair use and the rest that the internet gods failed to resolve before the technology took off. I’m not sure I’m for Schultz’s draconian approach, but for a free market to exist, there needs to be more market than free.

My solution to copyright would be simple. Before anyone can link a story, they must work as a reporter for a 24-hour period, having to call sources, sort facts and interview people who don’t want to be interviewed. If at the end of all that work, they have no problem letting people take it and use it as their own, without a byline or a paycheck, so be it.

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