Commentary
The Pitfalls Of Pay Walls
- by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, August 6, 2009
But now that we're in a recession, Murdoch says he intends to start charging for Web articles at his newspapers, including not just the Journal but also The Times of London, The New York Post and other papers.
Obviously News Corp. isn't the only company contemplating charging for online articles given the economic climate, which has made the ad-supported model more challenging. Other news companies like The New York Times, and industry players like Steven Brill, are also talking about charging readers for online access.
But some newspaper executives seem oddly unfazed by a significant flaw in this plan: Many digital articles are going to be available for free whether the newspapers want them to be or not. That's because readers have always shared the stories they like, with or without the publishers' blessing.
What's more, other Web sites are going to rewrite those stories and sell ads against them, again with or without the newspapers' approval.
Murdoch told The Guardian that he anticipates resorting to litigation to enforce the company's copyright. But U.S. copyright law doesn't currently prevent people from rewriting stories because facts can't be copyrighted. While the Associated Press, and some industry observers, are attempting to revive the "hot news" doctrine -- which would give news outlets an exclusive right to publish scoops -- it's not clear that courts will go along with this plan. In the U.S., there's a very good argument that the "hot news" concept violates freedom of speech, at least as courts have interpreted the First Amendment in the recent past.
Besides, even if these types of lawsuits prove feasible, copyright litigation is very costly. Just ask the Recording Industry Association of America, which has spent millions to sue individual file-sharers without even coming close to recouping its legal bills.
Given the crisis facing newspapers today, the last thing publishers should embrace is a new business model that will depend on expensive, potentially unwinnable lawsuits.
Wendy Davis is a Senior Writer at MediaPost. You can reach Wendy at wdavis@mediapost.com
You are absolutely right Wendy. When the New Zealand Herald attempted to paywall "premium content" on nzherald.co.nz in 2005, a pirate version appeared almost immediately. The pirates simply scraped the paid content of the bona fide site and republished it every day. The newspaper eventually got the pirate site shut down. But in 2009 there are lots of ways to share content that didn't exist a few years ago. This could be a real headache for publishers who decide to go the paid route and try to enforce copyright. BTW, the Herald abandoned paid content in 2007.