interview – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Techdirt Podcast Episode 327: Walled Culture Interview

from the we're-back dept

We’ve got a cross-post episode for you this week! Recently, Mike appeared on the Walled Culture podcast to discuss a wide range of topics including reflections on the SOPA/PIPA fight, ways to support creators, and the world of NFTs. You can listen to the entire interview on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: interview, nfts, pipa, podcast, sopa

The Differences Between Copyright And Possession: Gilda Radner Interview Copyright Lawsuit Dismissed For Lack Of Registration

from the well-this-is-a-fun-one dept

Over the years, we’ve written about a few legal disputes regarding the question of who (if anyone) holds the copyright on an interview. That question was potentially at issue in a dispute over some audio recordings of comedian Gilda Radner being interviewed by journalist Hillary Johnson. Johnson was apparently hired by publisher Simon & Schuster in 1987 to interview Radner (who was already dealing with the ovarian cancer that would eventually lead to her death), in order to help Radner write an autobiography. Radner’s brother, Michael, kept the tapes of the interview, and they were “found” recently, and used in a recent documentary about Radner. According to the film’s director, Lisa D?Apolito, Michael Radner had handed over boxes of Radner’s stuff to her to use for the film.

The filmmakers, after finding the tapes of Johnson interviewing Radner, had reached out to Johnson about possibly interviewing her for the documentary, but when Johnson demanded money to be interviewed, they moved on. Johnson then argued that she holds at least some copyright interest in the interviews, and sued. There are, of course, lots of questions about who holds a copyright in an interview — and some of us believe that such interviews don’t deserve copyright protection at all, as it’s not the copyright that is creating the incentive here. But, this case got tossed out on a different kind of technicality: Johnson has no registration for the copyright, even if she actually has a copyright interest in the interview, and you can’t sue over a copyright if you haven’t registered it.

And, the case is even a bit more interesting than that, because Johnson claims the problem is she can’t register the copyright because she doesn’t have the tapes and Michael Radner (who is also a defendant) won’t give her the tapes so she can run down to the Copyright Office and register them. This makes it all quite simple for the judge:

Plaintiff concedes she has not registered a copyright in any audiotape of a recorded interview. Indeed, both the amended complaint and plaintiff?s opposition to the instant motion acknowledge that plaintiff?s ?inability to register her [alleged] copyrights deprives her of any right to sue for infringement.?…

Accordingly, plaintiff?s copyright infringement claim is dismissed.

Indeed, the case is so open-and-shut that the judge has said that Johnson has to pay the legal fees of the defendants she sued.

Here, the amended complaint contains one substantive claim?the copyright infringement claim against the moving defendants. Yet in the very complaint through which plaintiff asserts that claim, plaintiff acknowledges she currently has no right to do so…. Plaintiff?s opposition to the instant motion likewise recognizes that plaintiff?s ?inability to register her copyrights deprives her of any right to sue for infringement.?…

The Court finds objectively unreasonable plaintiff?s attempt to prosecute a claim that her own pleading acknowledges she has no right to pursue at this time. Indeed, in the Court?s view, the amended complaint?s concession that plaintiff?s copyright infringement claim is nonviable renders that claim frivolous. Although the Court does not discern any improper motive behind plaintiff?s claims, nor is the Court eager to award attorney?s fees, the Court nonetheless concludes that awarding the moving defendants costs and a reasonable attorney?s fee is warranted under the circumstances of this case.

I’ve seen some of the copyright system’s regular defenders insisting that this case is a travesty of justice, and a reason why the US should get rid of the requirement for works to be registered before you can sue. This is… crazy. Indeed, if anything, we should be moving back in the other direction, and require registration to get a copyright in the first place. The issue here is one of pure greed. This interview does not exist because of a copyright-driven incentive. Johnson was hired to do a job and she did it. It seems clear she then didn’t keep the tapes or think there was any commercial value in the tapes. She had nothing to do with their rediscovery or the new movie. She just wanted to get paid for something she apparently was already paid to do decades ago.

But, once again, this highlights the difference between possessing the actual “content” (or the medium in which content is “fixed”) and holding a copyright on that content. It’s one of those issues that trips people up — but also highlights yet again why copyright is not property in the traditional sense. This was a good and easy ruling, and the way to fix such “weird” situations is to go back to a system of formalities, where registration is necessary to even get the copyright in the first place. Then you don’t have greedy people showing up years later, demanding a cut of something when they never had any copyright interest previously.

Filed Under: copyright, gilda radner, hillary johnson, interview, lisa d'apolito, michael radner, possession, property rights, registration

Boston Globe Posts Hilarious Fact-Challenged Interview About Regulating Google, Without Any Acknowledgement Of Errors

from the and-we-wonder-why-news-is-failing dept

Warning: this article will discuss a bunch of nonsense being said in a major American newspaper about Google. I fully expect that the usual people will claim that I am writing this because I always support Google — which would be an interesting point if true — but of course it is not. I regularly criticize Google for a variety sketchy practices. However, what this story is really about is why the Boston Globe would publish, without fact checking, a bunch of complete and utter nonsense.

The Boston Globe recently put together an entire issue about “Big Tech” and what to do about it. I’d link to it, but for some reason when I click on it, the Boston Globe is now telling me it no longer exists — which, maybe, suggests that the Boston Globe should do a little more “tech” work itself. However, a few folks sent in this fun interview with noted Google/Facebook hater Jonathan Taplin. Now, we’ve had our run-ins with Taplin in the past — almost always to correct a whole bunch of factual errors that he makes in attacking internet companies. And, it appears that we need to do this again.

Of course, you would think that the Boston Globe might have done this for us, seeing as they’re a “newspaper” and all. Rather than just printing the words verbatim of someone who is going to say things that are both false and ridiculous, why not fact check your own damn interview? Instead, it appears that the Globe decided “let’s find someone to say mean things about Google” and turned up Taplin… and then no one at the esteemed Globe decided “gee, maybe we should check to see if he actually knows what he’s talking about or if he’s full of shit.” Instead, they just ran the interview, and people who read it without knowing that Taplin is laughably wrong won’t find out about it unless they come here. But… let’s dig in.

What would smart regulation look like?

You start with fairly rigorous privacy regulations where you have the ability to opt out of data collection from Google. Then you look at something like a modification of the part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is what is known as safe harbor. Google and Facebook and Twitter operate under a very unique set of legal regimes that no other company gets to benefit from, which is that no one can sue them for doing anything wrong.

Ability to opt-out of data collection — fair enough. To some extent that’s already possible if you know what you’re doing, but it would be good if Google/Facebook made that easier. Honestly, that’s not going to actually have much of an impact really. I still think the real solution to the dominance of Google/Facebook is to enable more competition that can provide better services that can help limit the power of those guys. But Taplin’s suggestion really seems to be going in the other direction, seeking to lock in their power, while complaining about them.

The “modification” of the DMCA, for example, would almost certainly lock in Google and Facebook and make it nearly impossible for competitors to step up. Also, the DMCA is not “known as safe harbor.” The DMCA — a law that was almost universally pushed by the record labels — is a law that updated copyright law in a number of ways, including giving copyright holders the power to censor on the internet, without any due process or judicial review of whether or not infringement had taken place. There is a small part of it, within Section 512, that includes a very limited safe harbor, that says that while actual infringers are still liable for infringement, the internet platforms they use are not liable if they follow a bunch of rules, including removing the content expeditiously and kicking people off their platform for repeat infringement.

The idea that “Google and Facebook and Twitter operate under a very unique set of legal regimes that no other company gets to benefit from” is complete and utter nonsense, and the Boston Globe’s Alex Kingsbury should have pushed back on it. The Copyright Office’s database of DMCA registered agents includes nearly 9,000 companies (including ours!), because the DMCA’s 512 safe harbors apply to any internet platform who registers. Google, Facebook and Twitter don’t get special treatment.

Furthermore, as a new report recently showed, taking away such safe harbors would do more to entrench the power of Google, Facebook and Twitter since all three companies can deal with such liability, while lots of smaller companies and upstarts cannot. It boggles the mind that the Boston Globe let Taplin say something so obviously false without challenging him.

And, we haven’t even gotten to the second half of that sentence, which is the bizarre and simply false claim that the DMCA’s Section 512 means that “no one can sue them for doing anything wrong.” Again, this is just factually incorrect, and a good journalist would challenge someone for making such a blatantly false claim. The DMCA’s 512 does not, in any way, stop anyone from suing anyone “for doing anything wrong.” That’s ridiculous. The DMCA’s 512 says that a copyright holder will be barred from suing a platform for copyright infringement if a user (not the platform) infringes on copyright and when notified of that alleged infringement, the platform expeditiously removes that content. In addition to that, thanks to various court rulings, the DMCA’s safe harbors are limited in other ways, including that the platforms cannot encourage their use for infringement and they must have implemented repeat infringer policies. No where in any of that does it say that platforms can’t be sued for doing anything wrong.

If the platform does something wrong, they absolutely can be sued. It’s simply a fantasy interpretation of the DMCA to pretend otherwise. Why didn’t the Boston Globe point out these errors? I have no idea, but they let the interview and its nonsense continue.

In other words, they have complete liability protection from being sued for any of the content that is on their services. That is totally unique. Obviously newspapers doesn?t get that protection. And of course also [tech giants] have other advantages over all other corporations; all of the labor that users put in is basically free. Most of us work an hour a day for Google or Facebook improving their services, and we don?t get anything for that other than just services.

Again, they do not have “complete liability protection from being sued for any content that is on their services.” Anything they post themselves, they are still liable for. Anything that a user posts on its platform, if the platform does not comply with DMCA 512, the platform can still be liable for. All DMCA 512 is saying is that they can be liable for a small sliver of content if they fail to follow the rules set out in the law that was pushed for heavily by the recording industry.

Next up, the claim that “obviously newspapers don’t get that protection” is preposterous. Of course they do. A quick search of the Copyright Office database shows registrations by tons of newspaper companies, including the Chicago Tribune, the Daily News, USA Today, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Albany Times Union, the NY Times, the Times Herald, the Times Picayune, the Washington Times, the Post Standard, the Palm Beach Post, the Cincinnati Post, the Kentucky Post, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the NY Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Washington Post, Ann Arbor News, the Albany Business News, Reno News & Review, the Dayton Daily News, Springfiled News Sun, the Des Moines Register, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Branson News Leader, the Bergen News, the Pennysaver News, the News-Times, the New Canaan News, Orange County News, San Antonio News-Express, the National Law Journal, the Williamsburg Journal Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, the Lafayette Journal-Courier, the Oregon Statesman Journal, the Daily Journal and on and on and on. Literally I just got tired of writing down names. There are a lot more.

Notably missing? As far as I can tell, the Boston Globe has not registered a DMCA agent. Odd that.

But, back to the point: yes, newspapers get the same damn protection. There is nothing special about Google, Facebook and Twitter. And by now Taplin must know this. So should the Boston Globe.

Ah, but perhaps — you’ll argue — he means that the paper versions don’t get the same protection, while the internet sites do. And, you’d still be wrong. All the DMCA 512 says is that you don’t get to put liability on a third party who had no say in the content posted. With your normal print newspaper that’s not an issue because a newspaper is not a user-generated content thing. It has an editor who is choosing what’s in there. That’s not true of online websites. And that’s why we need a safe harbor like the DMCA’s, otherwise people stupidly blame a platform for actions of their users.

And let’s not forget — because this is important — anything a website does to directly encourage infringement would take away those safe harbors, a la the Grokster ruling in the Supreme Court, which said you lose those safe harbors if you’re inducing infringing. In other words, basically every claim made by Taplin here is wrong. Why does the Boston Globe challenge none of them? What kind of interview is this?

And we’re just on the first question. Let’s move on.

What would eliminating the ?safe harbor? provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act mean?

YouTube wouldn?t be able to post 44,000 ISIS videos and sell ads for them.

Wait, what? Once again, there’s so much wrong in just this one sentence that it’s almost criminal that the Boston Globe’s reporter doesn’t say something. Let’s start with this one first: changing copyright law to get rid of a safe harbor will stop YouTube from posting ISIS videos? What about copyright law has any impact on ISIS videos one way or the other? Absolutely nothing. Even assuming that ISIS is somehow violating someone’s copyright in their videos (which, seems unlikely?) what does that have to do with anything?

Second, YouTube is not posting any ISIS videos. YouTube is not posting any videos. Users of YouTube are posting videos. That’s the whole point of the safe harbors. That it’s users doing the uploading and not the platform. And the point of the DMCA safe harbor is to clarify the common sense point that you don’t blame the tool for the user’s actions. You don’t blame Ford because someone drove a Ford as a getaway car in a bank robbery. You don’t blame AT&T when someone calls in a bomb threat.

Third, YouTube has banned ISIS videos (and any terrorist propaganda videos) going back a decade. Literally back to 2008. That’s when YouTube stopped allowing videos from terrorist organizations. How could Taplin not know this? How could the Boston Globe not know this. Over the years, YouTube has even built new algorithms designed to automatically spot “extremist” content and block it (how well that works is another question). Indeed, YouTube is so aggressive in taking down such videos that it’s been known to also take down the videos of humanitarian groups documenting war crimes by terrorists.

Finally, YouTube has long refused to put ads on anything deemed controversial content. Also, it won’t put ads on videos of channels without lots and lots of followers.

So basically in this one short sentence — 14 words long — has four major factual errors in it. Wow. And he’s not done yet.

Or they wouldn?t be able to put up any musician?s work, whether they wanted it on the service or not, without having to bear some consequences. That would really change things.

Again, YouTube is not the one putting up works. Users of YouTube are. And if and when those people upload a video — that is not covered by fair use or other user rights — and it is infringing, then the copyright holder has every right under the DMCA that Taplin misstates earlier to force the video down. And if YouTube doesn’t take it down, then they face all the consequences of being an infringer.

So what would “really change” if we removed the DMCA’s safe harbors? Well, YouTube has already negotiated licenses with basically every record label and publisher at this point. So, basically nothing would change on YouTube. But, you know, for every other platform, they’d be screwed. So, Taplin’s plan to “break up” Google… is to lock the company in as the only platform. Great.

And this leaves aside the fact (whether we like it or not) that under YouTube’s ContentID system which allows copyright holders to “monetize” infringing works has actually opened up a (somewhat strange) new revenue stream for artists, who are now actually profiting greatly from letting people use their works without going through the hassle of negotiating a full license.

I also think it would change the whole fake news conversation completely, because, once Facebook or YouTube or Google had to take responsibility for what?s on their services, they would have to be a lot more careful to monitor what goes on there.

Again… what? What in the “whole fake news conversation” has anything to do with copyright? This is just utter nonsense.

Second, if platforms are suddenly “responsible” for what’s on their service, then… Taplin is saying that the very companies he hates, that he thinks are the ruination of culture and society, should be the final arbiters of what speech is okay online. Is that really what he wants? He wants Google and Facebook and YouTube — three platforms he’s spent years attacking — determining if his own speech is fake news?

Really?

Because, let’s face it, as much as I hate the term, this interview is quintessential fake news. Nearly every sentence Taplin says includes some false statement — often multiple false statements. And the Boston Globe published it. Should the Boston Globe now be liable for Taplin’s deranged understanding of the law? Should we be able to sue the Boston Globe because it published utter nonsense uttered by Jonathan Taplin? Because that’s what he’s arguing for. Oh, but, I forgot, according to Taplin, the Boston Globe — as a newspaper — has no such safe harbor, so it’s already fair game. Sue away, people…

Wouldn?t that approach subject these services to death by a thousand copyright-infringement lawsuits?

It would depend on how it was put into practice. When someone tries to upload pornography to YouTube, an artificial intelligence agent sees a bare breast and shunts it into a separate queue. Then a human looks at it and says, ?Well, is this National Geographic, or is this porn?? If it?s National Geographic it probably gets on the service, and if it?s porn it goes in the trash. So, it?s not like they?re not doing this already. It?s just they?ve chosen to filter porn off of Facebook and Google and YouTube but they haven?t chosen to filter ISIS, hate speech, copyrighted material, fake news, that kind of stuff.

This is just a business decision on their part. They know every piece of content that?s being uploaded because they used the ID to decide who gets the advertising. So they could do all of this very easily. It?s just they don?t want to do it.

First off, finally, the Boston Globe reporter pushes back slightly. Not by correcting any of the many, many false claims that Taplin has made so far, but in highlighting a broader point: that Taplin’s solution is completely idiotic and unworkable, because we already see the abuse that the DMCA takedown process gets. But… Taplin goes into spin mode and suggests there’s some magic way that this system wouldn’t be abused for censorship (even though the existing system is).

Then he explains his fantasy-land explanation of how YouTube moderation actually works. He’s wrong. This is not how it works. Most content is never viewed by a human. But let’s delve in deeper again. Taplin and some of his friends like to point to the automated filtering of porn. But porn is something that is much easier to teach a computer to spot. A naked breast is something you can teach a computer to spot pretty well. Fake news is not. Hate speech is not. Separately, notice that Taplin never ever mentions ContentID in this entire interview? Even though that does the very thing he seems to insist that YouTube refuses to do? ContentID does exactly what he claims this porn filter is doing. But he pretends it doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed for years.

And the Boston Globe just lets it slide.

Also, again, Taplin insists that YouTube and Facebook “haven’t chosen to filter ISIS” even though both companies have done so for years. How does Taplin not know this? How does the Boston Globe reporter not know this? How does the Boston Globe think that its ignorant reporter should interview this ignorant person? Why did they then decide to publish any of this? Does the Boston Globe employ fact checkers at all? The mind boggles.

Meanwhile, we really shouldn’t let it slide that Taplin — when asked specifically about copyright infringement — seems to argue that if copyright law was changed, it would somehow magically lead Google to stop ISIS videos, hate speech and fake news among other things. None of those things has anything to do with copyright law. Shouldn’t he know this? Shouldn’t the Boston Globe?

As for the second paragraph, it’s also utter nonsense. YouTube “knows every piece of content that’s being uploaded because they used the ID to decide who gets the advertising.” What does that even mean. What is “the ID”? And, even in the cases where YouTube does decide to place ads on videos (again, which is greatly restricted, and is not for all content), the fact that Google’s algorithms can try to insert relevant ads does not mean that Google “knows” what’s in the content. It just means that an algorithm does some matching. And, sure, Taplin might point out that if they can do that, why can’t they also do it for copyright and ISIS and the answer is that THEY DO. That’s the whole fucking point.

Again, why is the Boston Globe publishing utter nonsense?

Is Google trying to forestall this kind of regulation?

Ultimately YouTube is already moving towards being a service that pays content providers. They announced last month that they?re going to put up a YouTube music channel. And that will look much more like Spotify than it looks like YouTube. In other words, they will license content from providers, they will charge $10 a month for the service, and you will then get curated lists of music. From the point of view of the artists and the record company, it?ll be a lot better than the system that exists now ? where essentially YouTube says to you, your content is going to be on YouTube whether you want it to or not, so check this box if you want us to give you a little bit of the advertising.

YouTube has been paying content providers for years. I mean, it’s been years since the company announced that in one year alone, it had paid musicians, labels and publishers over a billion dollars. And Taplin claims they’re “moving” to such a model? Is he stuck in 2005? And, they already license content from providers. The $10/month thing again, is not new (it’s been available for years), but that’s a separate service, which is not the same as regular YouTube. And it has nothing to do with any of this. If the DMCA changed, then… that wouldn’t have any impact at all on any of this.

Still, let’s recap the logic here: So YouTube offering a music service, which it set up to compete with Spotify and Apple Music, and which has nothing to do with the regular YouTube platform, will somehow “forestall” taking away the DMCA’s safe harbors? How exactly does that work? I mean, wouldn’t the logic work the other way?

The whole interview is completely laughable. Taplin repeatedly makes claims that don’t pass the laugh test for anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the space. And nowhere does the Boston Globe address the multiple outright factual errors. Sure, I can maybe (maybe?) understand not pushing back on Taplin in the moment of the interview. But why let this go to print without having someone (anyone?!?) with even the slightest understanding of the law or how YouTube actually works, check to see if Taplin’s claims were based in reality? Is that really so hard?

Apparently it is for the Boston Globe and its “deputy editor” Alex Kingsbury.

Filed Under: content moderation, copyright, dmca, dmca 512, intermediary liability, internet, interview, isis, jonathan taplin, journalism, regulation, videos
Companies: boston globe, facebook, google, twitter, youtube

YouTubers Got To Interview The President Because They're More Legitimate Than Traditional News

from the among-the-disrupted dept

If there’s one overarching theme of this blog for the 16+ years that it’s been around, it might be “disrupted industries behaving badly.” It seems to be a fairly constant theme. And the news business is no exception. And, boy, have they been bitching and whining about it a lot lately. If you want to see the quintessential example of clueless self-pity, it has to be Leon Wieseltier’s recent NY Times whinefest, Among the Disrupted. Wieseltier is definitely among the disrupted, having recently lost his longtime job at the New Republic as part of a publication-wide freakout over the fact that the new management (led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes) wanted to try to make the magazine a bit more relevant to the younger generation. It is a paean to elitism, eloquently insisting that without the cultural elite guiding the way, the digital riffraff online will never understand the true cultural meaning of anything.

A similar piece appeared last week, in the SF Chronicle, by Jon Carroll, in which he does his best impression of telling the digital kids to get off his lawn, while trying to come to terms with the fact that those darn kids today just don’t really trust or believe in the “real media” any more (though he seems to use a rather arbitrary description of who is good — Al Jazeera — and who is crud — Fox News).

But to see the truly hysterical old media in action, you need to just pay attention to the collective freakout over the White House’s decision to let three YouTube stars interview President Obama. It quickly became an easy punchline for sneering elites that this was somehow “beneath the dignity” of the White House. Much of the focus was on one of the three, GloZell Green, a comedian who does funny stuff on her YouTube channel — including silly challenges, like (the one that everyone keeps bringing up) taking a bath in cereal.

Hank Green, one of the other two YouTubers who took part in the interview has hit back with an absolutely fantastic post explaining why it totally makes sense for the White House to have such YouTubers interview the President, rather than the mainstream media. And it’s because most people don’t think the mainstream media is legitimate any more. It’s lost its legitimacy, because the facade of what the news does has come down. The traditional news report — what Jay Rosen has repeatedly referred to as “the church of the savvy” or “the view from nowhere” — focuses on playing up their own connections and insiderness, rather than honesty and earnestness.

But these YouTubers, by contrast, are real — and people trust them and view them as legitimate because they’re real. As Green writes:

I think sub-consciously they understand the really terrifying thing here. Glozell and Bethany and I weren?t put in a chair next to President Obama because we have cultivated an audience. We were put there because we have cultivated legitimacy.

The source of our legitimacy is the very different from their coiffed, Armani institutions. It springs instead (and I?m aware that I?m abandoning any modicum of modesty here) from honesty. In new media this is often called ?authenticity? because our culture is too jaded to use a big fat word like ?honesty? without our gallbladders clogging up, but that?s really what it is.

Glozell, Bethany and I don?t sit in fancy news studios surrounded by fifty thousand dollar cameras and polished metal and glass backdrops with inlayed 90-inch LCD screens. People trust us because we?ve spent years developing a relationship with them. We have been scrutinized and found not evil. Our legitimacy comes from honesty, not from cultural signals or institutions.

And with young people having no reasons to trust those cultural signals that we older folks were raised with, this is the only thing that works for them anymore. Our values and interests mesh with theirs enough that they?ve come to trust us. They trust us to make content that they will enjoy and they trust us to be the kind of people they can look up to. People who betray that trust risk losing everything that they have built.

What’s amazing is that the Carroll article I mentioned earlier actually is an almost perfect mirror of Green’s article in some ways. They both mock the fakeness of Fox News. And they both admit that people now trust their friends and social media contacts more than such news providers. But in Carroll’s world, this is dangerous and a sign of the people today not wanting “content” but just snippets:

People don?t want content anymore. They want diversion, and there?s plenty of that. Even the occasional discussion of public issues is diverting; have an opinion, post and go. The formats do not encourage complex discussion, and wit is prized above knowledge.

People don?t care what the media say. They care what their friends say; they get what information they get from people just like themselves. They don?t buy the new, friendlier one-to-many model; it?s still just strangers babbling. You know your friends; you trust them. If they say a restaurant is good, it?s good. If a media site says it, who cares?

Of course, it?s not as simple as that. We?re in a transitional phase; old-media outlets may be shrinking but they still make a lot of money, while the business model for digital publication is a work in progress. But the trends are clear. Objective reporting is now considered impossible, so why bother? And equally: Why bother with complexity?

It really seems like Carroll and Green are discussing the same phenomenon, but from very different perspectives. Green is surfing the wave, while Carroll is being dragged under by it. And, frankly, Carroll is wrong. People absolutely do want “content.” They crave it. What they want is honest content — and that’s the point that Green is making. They care what their friends say because that’s honest, and as even Carroll admits in his piece, the media doesn’t do that very well.

But from honesty can come complexity. And investigative reporting and a variety of other things. Carroll argues that this new wave has killed off such investigative reporting, but that’s ridiculous and wrong. He whines about crusaders, but it’s those crusaders who have taken a deep interest in key issues that allows them to do the investigative reporting that needs to be done — and to do it in a manner that people trust. Because it’s real. Glenn Greenwald isn’t a traditional investigative reporter, but he’s built up a mountain of trust, because his own personality shines through in everything that he does. Agree with him or not, no one can deny that Greenwald is quite real and unlike the interchangeable heads seen on cable news. And the same is true for other “real” figures that the traditional media likes to mock, like Jon Stewart or Jon Oliver. They take different paths, but they really connect with their viewers. And it’s the same for the YouTubers that the White House invited in.

The legacy media players may not like it, but mainly because it rips down the facade they’ve been living behind for so long. The facade that pretends they’re all about “objective news reporting” when the reality has long been that they’re more focused on being seen as important. The gatekeepers of the news. But the news has no more gatekeepers, and the public seems to prefer honesty, rather than made up objectivity. The view from nowhere now means that many people (especially younger people) see those newscasters as being nowhere at all. And that’s why it completely makes sense for the White House to reach out to those people who are real, who have built up trust, and who will continue to be real, even if they ask questions that the mainstream media considers beneath them.

Filed Under: authenticity, glozell green, hank green, interview, jon carroll, journalism, leon wiesteltier, president obama, state of the union

ABA Journal's Patent Application To Score Interview With USPTO Boss David Kappos

from the nice-work dept

ChurchHatesTucker writes “The ABA Journal was unable to secure an interview with the USPTO chief, so they published a faux business method patent for securing an interview. Within four hours, they got their interview.”

Yes, but the real question is whether or not the USPTO would approve the patent…

Filed Under: david kappos, fake patents, interview, patents

News.com Interview On CwF+RtB

from the rage?-what-rage? dept

Greg Sandoval, over at News.com, ran an interview with me about both Techdirt and our CwF+RtB experiment. The only quibble is that “full of rage” bit. As most people who know me will tell you, I’m about as far from “filled with rage” as just about anyone. I’m a pretty laid back, happy, optimistic guy. Can’t think of much to have rage about — but I could see how some might misinterpret some of my writings that way. Anyway, I’m way behind on posting about some of our findings (though, the interview reveals a few), and will try to get to it very soon. There isn’t much left to buy (and we’re down to limited sizes on t-shirts/hoodies of what is left), but we’ll try to do a refresh with some new offerings soon. In the meantime, we’ve started shipping stuff out, but we’re still waiting on all the signed books/music to get that out, so please hold on if you haven’t received yours yet…

Filed Under: cwf, interview, rtb, techdirt

Techdirt Interviews Britannica President Jorge Cauz

from the color-us-skeptical dept

A while back I did a slightly flippant post suggesting that Britannica’s Webshare program — which allows bloggers free access to the Britannica website — was a step in the right direction, but was probably too little, too late to compete effectively against Wikipedia. Jorge Cauz, Britannica president, asked for the opportunity to give his side of the story, and so we’re pleased to feature this short interview, which was conducted last Wednesday.

I was reasonably impressed with Cauz’s answers. Competing against Wikipedia is an awfully difficult thing to do, and Cauz seems to be doing many of the right things — focusing on timeliness, collaboration, and other areas where Wikipedia currently has the edge. He points out that Britannica has another line of products in the K-12 education space, which suggests that Britannica is already leveraging its brand name in other businesses, suggesting that my idea of licensing the brand to another company might not be such a good idea.

Nevertheless, I think Britannica is going to face a serious uphill challenge to remain relevant in a Wikipedia-dominated encyclopedia market. Cauz says that traffic has grown 40 percent in the last two years, and that 17 percent of its traffic comes from its Webshare program. But 40 percent traffic growth isn’t that impressive when we consider how far behind Britannica is to Wikipedia in web traffic. For example, between January 2006 and January 2007, Wikipedia more than doubled its traffic. If Britannica is growing at 20 percent per year and Wikipedia is growing at 150 percent a year, Britannica’s will become less and less relevant in terms of market share. So while Britannica’s market share may not be literally dwindling, they’re going to have to take some much more radical steps if they want to capture more than a trivial share of the encyclopedia market.

Techdirt: Mr. Cauz, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. Tell me a little bit about the Webshare program.

Jorge Cauz: I don’t recall exactly when it was launched, but we launched the functionality a couple of years ago. It has been implemented for a while and the main idea behind the Webshare program was trying to make sure that people link to us freely and make sure that the people who follow those links can have access to Britannica. I read your post, and in contrast to your belief that many people won’t do it–or at least that you won’t do it–we now have close to 17 percent of our traffic coming from people directly linking to us. So Webshare has been a good way for us to show non-subscribers the depth, breadth, and quality of the content we have. So I think it’s good for us and good for the readers of our content.

And the other 83 percent are paid subscribers?

Well, they’re basically paid subscribers, people that are coming and visiting us. We have several different sites, but on the consumer site, we have about 700,000 unique visitors every day.

What’s your long-term vision for the site, and for the company? Is it going to continue to be a subscription-based website? Is the paper-based encyclopedia going to continue?

Paper is completely incidental for us. It’s not a very important business for us. We continue to do it and it continues to be profitable, but it is a very small portion of our business and an even smaller portion of our profits. Britannica basically is a digital company today. The majority of our revenues come from non-tangible products, both in the institutional market and the consumer space. I read your advice on your blog, and I think your suggestions for business models are faulty.

I think that there are plenty of ways in which Britannica can continue to grow in the future. Many of them are in the e-learning space. Today we have more than than 47 percent penetration in the K-12 market. We have almost 70 percent penetration in the public library market. And these aren’t just reference products. These are e-learning solutions around the teacher. We try to be a more relevant source in the classroom as opposed to in the library. There are programs that are linked to the curriculum that are reading level appropriate that are full of lesson plans and interaction materials that are much more part of the learning process as opposed to a passive role in the reference products. There’s a huge new stream of revenue coming in from these e-learning products in the K-12 market.

And I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that all of those products weren’t viable. My focus was more on the encyclopedia.

But that’s far from licensing the brand as an empty shell to someone who wants to do something like Napster. That’s actually, I think, myopic.

Sure, that’s a good point. So in terms of the encyclopedia, the long-term market you think is primarily in k-12 education?

No, no, no. We have very different databases and very different services. We have products that are meant for young kids. We have products that are meant for the middle school market. And there are products like the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is meant for the generally curious lay person. You know, that will continue to be an important part of our business, and it will continue to be an important part of our effort. That database, and the service that we provide for those people that are seeking knowledge and are intellectually curious, you know that product, which I think has great potential.

I tend to disagree with you in terms of your assessment of Britannica vs. Wikipedia. I do think that we are obviously, by the nature of what we do and how we go about it, we are a smaller dataset than that of Wikipedia but size is not the only thing that matters. Timeliness–I tend to disagree with you. We change our articles not every month, not every week, but we change our articles on a daily basis. If things require, we change our articles every 20 minutes. We have a publishing system that allows us to change our articles immediately. We have a publishing system that engages communities and users with our content and allows them to actually spot things that may be not updated and for us to turn our attention to those and actually be able to process those things quite immediately.

Our new generation of products, which you’ll see very very soon, you’ll see a very different version. You will start seeing completely new features into the Britannica products in the consumer space, where the key thing here is collaboration. It’s about ownership of content–not ownership in terms of who owns the copyright, which is completely incidental–ownership in terms of who is behind the content and who is saying what. So you will see really quite a different Britannica and we believe that you will be pleasantly surprised. I hope to be able talk to you six months or a year from now and be able to revisit some of your business model proposals for Britannica. Maybe see if what we’re doing is something that you think would be profitable.

By the way, for the record, you mentioned that we have a dwindling number of subscribers. We have grown thanks to the clarity with which the market has in terms of the difference between us and Wikipedia and the other competitors, subscribers in the consumer space have grown 40 percent in the two years. Revenue from the institutional market and in the college market alone has gone up more than 25 percent. So it’s not a dwindling number, but a larger market because of some of the factors that you might be dismissive of: factually correct, objective. Not neutral point of view like Wikipedia. We don’t strive for that. We think there are reasonable, informed points of view that are worthwhile exploring and letting the reader be exposed to it. We try to reach objectivity by having a fair share of these points and counterpoints being discussed in articles at great length. There’s a huge amount of respect for factual correctness at Britannica, for objectivity.

Also, Britannica has an impeccable style that people are able to understand, that people are able to learn from Britannica basic language rules, things that will not be happening in Wikipedia. Obviously, up-to-date-ness is something that we don’t relax on. We update the database at the rate of about 30-35 percent per year. A third of the database is completely revised on a yearly basis thanks to the input of our contributors. That’s something that is probably much more speedy than Wikipedia. Obviously Wikipedia cannot do that because they are several times as large as we are. So again, a few of the things that I believe are either urban myth or people want to believe or “truthiness” are not necessarily corresponding with how we see it and how we can actually tell you that it is. We do have the numbers with us, and we do have the ability to refute some of these statements.

Can you talk a little bit more about the editing process? You mentioned timeliness, and you mentioned collaboration. One of the things I’ve found very impressive on Wikipedia is that if a news event happens, say somebody famous dies, it will be a matter of seconds before that’s updated on Wikipedia. Does Britannica have something like that?

Yes we do. Editors have the ability to go into the database and incorporate a change as it happens. When it’s important, the community will flag it, and an editor will change it in 20 minutes at the most. The editor can go in and publish directly online, and then we actually circumvent the process so when a person is actually changing an emergent fact that has been noticed, the copy-editing department doesn’t get involved and the indexing department doesn’t get involved. The editor has full power to make the changes that he or she sees as required. This is happening more and more.

These are some of the things we will see more evident. We will be able to not only change more frequently with the help of our editors and contributors with the new site that we will have but we will actually try to make sure that our users and visitors engage with the content much more frequently and use the content also for their own purposes in a different way. So again, it’s not going to be a wiki. Britannica will not delegate its responsibility as an editor. I think that you shouldn’t delegate your responsibility for what you say. You know, you have your name on your blog, and whether it’s true or not, you need to be behind it. We believe that that’s really a good model, with the view that the Internet actually provides huge opportunities for Britannica in the future. We believe that we’re going to be the first ones to make the process of creating knowledge a really, truly collaborative process without delegating the responsibility of us editors. I think it will be more evident in the next few weeks and months.

One of the trends I think we’ve seen recently is that search engines have become an increasingly important source of traffic. Is Britannica doing anything to make it easier for people to get to? So if an article comes up in a search engine result, is there a way that people can get access to that article for free or would they have to become subscribers in order to do that?

We are trying some different things in that area. We’re actually trying to segment the market, and these are some things that I’m not ready to discuss at this point but we’re doing continuous testing with search engines, trying to see what are the different ways in which we can segment the market and allow people to use our content for certain occasions without entirely giving away the subscription model which is still very important for us. It may change in the future or it may not; I’m not really married to the subscription model. I think there’s huge potential in the free web for Britannica.

So you think that in the future, the site could become a completely free, advertising supported site?

No, what I’m saying is that there would be a very good version of Britannica that would be free.

Filed Under: britannica, encyclopedias, interview, jorge cauz, wikipedia
Companies: britannica

Talking About Tapping Into The Insight Community

from the get-some-insight-now dept

Brian Deagon from Investor’s Business Daily spoke to me last week to discuss the details behind the Techdirt Insight Community, and IBD has now published the interview. The interview gives a good overview of the Techdirt Insight Community and the different ways companies are getting insight and analysis from the various experts in the Community, focusing mainly on how we help open up the market to allow companies (or individuals at companies) who might never otherwise have tapped into a research or analysis firm to get useful analysis from multiple perspectives.

Filed Under: experts, interview, investor's business daily, techdirt, techdirt insight community

Techdirt In The Interview Hotseat

from the Q&A dept

It’s apparently interview season, as two separate interviews that were done with me about Techdirt were just published. The first was conducted by Glyn Moody and appears in today’s Guardian over in the UK. It covers a variety of things, from the Techdirt Insight Community, to this blog, to the economics I tend to write about. It was a fun interview and it’s almost too bad that the limits of newsprint (and time) meant we couldn’t go into more depth on some of the subjects.

The second interview was by Michael Banks, for his new book called Blogging Heroes. Banks went out and interviewed a bunch of bloggers to try to find out the history of their blogs, what makes them blog and what advice they have for other bloggers. The publisher is conducting a little marketing experiment as well, where they send each of the bloggers who was interviewed a copy of their own interview to post on their blogs. So you’re starting to see a few different chapters available. It’s yet another experiment in understanding how free content makes good sense, so I can’t resist posting my interview here:

One point that unfortunately doesn’t come through clearly enough in either interview is how much we owe all the readers around here — especially those who actively participate in the comments and the Insight Community. This wouldn’t be worth doing without all of you. So, a big thank you from those of us at Techdirt!

Filed Under: blogging, interview, techdirt
Companies: techdirt