Copyright allegations against the blogosphere seem to be all the rage these days. The last several days on both TechMeme and Memeorandum have been filled with analysis and reporting on the AP's new policy (and subsequent "retraction") disallowing blogs from quoting in whole or partiality any of their wire pieces without proper payment and license. This odd trend continues, not from an Old Media source, but from a member of the blogosphere. Louis Gray reports that Benjamin Golub, creator of RSSMeme, has received threat of legal action for linking and re-publishing articles found to be popularly shared on Google Reader:
Today, RSSmeme's Benjamin Golub, who has developed a tracker for the most popular shared items on Google Reader, saw one unhappy publisher threaten him with legal action after she had found her feed included in the service. [...] Talking with him by phone this afternoon, he said the complainant's feed had only been shared two times, by a single sharer. But she had essentially penned an e-mail saying to "remove all content, or I will send a lawyer."
We Like RSSmeme and Services Like It...
To briefly re-hash all that, a splogger is someone who blatantly rips off content from a blog and publishes it with their own advertisements around it (there are hundreds of examples around the 'Net, and none need any more link-juice). An aggregator typically republishes headlines and snippets (like, for example, TechMeme and Technorati). Then, in some of the more advanced cases, you have shared items blogs and link blogs (like Google's Shared Items feature of Google Reader, or Tumblr) which will post either partial feeds, or more often complete feeds of the original posts, but typically without advertisements.
For most of you reading this, you are most likely thinking to yourself how disparate each one of these services is, how they all serve different purposes, and how the intention behind the republishing of feeds is completely different in each case. If so, you're completely correct.
But when you boil it down, the truth is that all these services are in their final form simply republishing content they didn't create (even if through human editing or algorithmic editing there has been an editorial selection process).
Is There a Cut and Dried Solution?
That's what makes this whole area of intellectual property use a tricky business. Most bloggers and content producers are highly irritated when folks rip off their content and use it for their own gain. Allen Stern thinks the silver-bullet answer to this is to charge for RSS (only a dollar for full feeds), though even he admits that implementing across all of the blogosphere this would be nigh-impossible.I prefer to liken this whole copyright situation to the same quandry that the record labels, Gene Simmons and Metallica face in their continuing struggle against the "evil" fans and customers.
Most of you here consuming these words are now in the majority opinion (that being that the record labels are a dying breed, and the digital music revolution, by hook and crook, is rising to replace the Old Media machine). I remember a day when I could write up a blog post defending P2P file sharing, and that would be considered controversial. It's now passe.
The solution is simple. Roll with the punches. If, instead of suing Napster into oblivion one of the major labels had purchased the company, I'm guessing that all the major record labels today wouldn't be on the verge of collapse. Alternatively, if the record labels had looked for other ways to create profit centers around the distribution and promotion of popular music, they wouldn't be in the dire straits they are at this point.
Similarly, bloggers need to look at alternative ways to create business models around their content (if, in fact they are trying to make a go of a business around content creation and production). Diversify, acquire, and above all bend with the wind.