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Corporate Pirates:
Institutional Content Confronts the Era of Rights
Management |
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19 January 2004 |
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At January's
SIIA Brown Bag Luncheon on "Piracy, Copyright and
Digital Rights Issues in Digital Content" the true tale of
content piracy's impact was told. As much as the kids have
grabbed the headlines, institutional content piracy has a
longer and more powerful legacy to examine, as highlighted
in the
USD 20 million court judgment against global
financial advisers Legg Mason in favor of a small
newsletter publisher. Digital rights management is hardly a
panacea for problems with complex corporate publishing
relationships, but independent publishers and technologists
are rewriting the rulebook on how content is sold and
accessed in major institutions. |
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I had lunch last week with an old
chum who sells a monthly newsletter to corporate folks, which
has gained in popularity and notoriety but not necessarily in
revenues to match its reputation. With a few slips of the
tongue from his clients and a little sleuthing, he found the
answer to his problem: his paper-based content was being copied
broadly and shamelessly by some pretty significant
companies which are no strangers to intellectual property laws.
No small wonder, then, that he had found himself at the
well-attended
SIIA Brown Bag Luncheon on "Piracy, Copyright and Digital
Rights Issues in Digital Content" to learn more about what he
could do to remedy this situation (our thanks again to the
SIIA and
their VP of Content Jeff Cutler for putting together and
moderating a great panel).
Although many of the today's headlines
concerning piracy have been centered on the music and movie
industries, the less-than-legal distribution of content has
been a longtime staple of the corporate world since the
invention of affordable photocopying and later cohorts such as
email and Intranets. While record companies target teens who
are vulnerable to lawsuits, even being able to identify
possible perpetrators behind the firewalls of major
institutions is a major challenge to content companies, much
less the thought of biting the hand that holds in it lucrative
contracts for electronic content distribution to thousands of
users. Leaky laws on protecting electronic database copyrights
do little to improve publishers' chances, though changes are
underway. With little incentive to prosecute and few primary
publishers of institutional content making noises about digital
rights, these publishers and distributors seem for the most
part to have sidestepped the current piracy debate.
Or have they? The panel on piracy at the
SIIA Brown Bag brought up some very interesting perspectives on
the ways in which the debate on intellectual property rights
enforcement is evolving in today's world of professional
content and related technologies. Here are a few of the major
points that came up in the discussion that seem to point
towards changes ahead:
- IP judgments favor Davids over
Goliaths. Ieuan Mahony, a Partner and member of Holland &
Knight's Intellectual Property Group gave a detailed and
engrossing account of how
last year's USD 20 million court judgement in favor
of financial newsletter distributor Lawry's Reports
against global financial advisors Legg Mason, Inc. has reset
the table for newsletter distributors and other small
publishers. The firm was found to have distributed a
single-person USD 700 subscription to over 1,000 brokers and
clients in violation of U.S. copyright laws, which applied
strongly in this case since the newsletter had registered its
issues with the U.S. Copyright office and enabled statutory
damages recourse. If small publishers take on Goliath firms
with firm copyright backing, "the Davids are going to win,"
notes Mahony. If this is the case, then there is much less
incentive for small publishers to rely upon large
distributors to guarantee income, especially when enterprise
search technology and rights management technology can enable
easy access and audit trails and subscription technologies
such as RSS make standardized distribution trivial.
- The premium cat is out of the
Google News bag. In its Beta form, Google News' ability
to provide search and summaries on both free and premium
copyrighted Web sources of news in near-realtime caught the
attention of many publishers who failed to challenge its
capabilities aggressively in legal arenas. By the time that
its marketplace power became apparent, some major publishers
had come to agreements that supported its continued crawling.
Actively or passively the notion that copyrighted news and
newsworthy content is fair game for search engines is gaining
steam. Keith Kupferschmid, VP
of IP Policy enforcement at the SIIA indicates that about
eighty companies are pushing for more stringent copyright
protections for content databases which may address this and
other access exposures, including heavies such as
Thomson, Reed-Elsevier, eBay and newspaper associations,
though they are opposed by librarians and the Chamber of
Commerce. But in the meantime the value of harvesting
headlines is being established in the public's mind.
- Premium aggregators are quietly on
the run. Like a castle's defenses being breached in "The
Lord of the Rings", representatives from major aggregators on
the panel seemed to be pointing towards marshalling their
forces into more defensible positions, albeit with positive
spin. Matt Hamel, General Counsel and Secretary for Factiva,
held out their patent-pending taxonomy and
stronger-than-copyright licensing as strong defenses against
the fairly minor problems that they have had with
intellectual property issues. But the more important IP
threats are from those facilities that abrogate the need for
dealing with traditional aggregators in the first place.
After decades of hiding content behind passwords and
enterprise-wide contracts, aggregators are having to confront
a world in which there are rapidly evolving alternatives to
protecting premium content value that may be better for
consumers and creators alike.
- Copyright enforcement and
enablement is a growth business. "Rights clearing is a
huge opportunity," noted Katherine Roome, VP and Associate
General Counsel for McGraw-Hill. Ed Colleran, Director of
Publisher Relations for Copyright Clearance Center was
ready to agree with this, given CCC's increasing prominence
in the clearing of content reuse rights in the online content
marketplace. CCC
concentrates on trying to help people to do the right thing
to enable legal content redistribution, increasingly adopting
a "point of content use" licensing approach for electronic
content. With digital objects enabled with embedded rights
management capabilities becoming available, the opportunities
to apply these capabilities as rights-protected content gets
passed along from user could create some very interesting
opportunities, indeed, though today's antiquated and
expensive copyright registration procedures may slow down
this march somewhat.
My friend came away from this discussion
rather heartened at the prospects of an independent publisher
being able to thrive in the institutional marketplace, but the
hard work for everyone is yet ahead. The
SIIA continues to push
hard in favor of copyright enforcement, and suits by the
Recording Industry Association of America have certainly
increased copyright awareness and underscored the need for
copyright education everywhere. But since today's baseline personal publishing technologies -
word processing, email, messaging and Web posting - make it
easy to to ignore laws before creating or onpassing protected content, the
expectations for changing human behavior will be low for some
time to come. We
have met the pirates - and "they are us".
-
John Blossom
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