Please don't make me laugh. Copyright isn't the problem.More than ten years ago, those newspaper began putting their content online intentionally so that people and search engines could link and aggregate it. That was the newspapers' stated purpose doing so. They knew that this was the Web’s very purpose; they knew that the Web was invented for that purpose. The copyright laws were perfectly acceptable to them then.

If they now don't want people or search engines to hyperlink, cite, and aggregate their content, simply take it offline. If the newspapers think their business plans to use an online medium designed for hyperlinkage and aggregation of content isn’t benefiting them, they can shut down their Web site. In the years since newspapers first put their content on the Web, there has been no difference in how people and search engines us it. The only difference is that newspaper companies have failed to us it well.

The problem is that the newspapers are still clinging to Industrial Era business models: the same but now outdated business models that they've been using for centuries. The copyright laws, which were perfectly acceptable to them ten years ago, aren't why their businesses are now failing.

They need to stop clamoring for protectionism, subsidies, or legal adjustment that favor them, and instead study and follow how publishers and broadcasters in Europe and Asia, and even in North America, have utilized the Web quite profitably. Better yet, study how the companies they're whining about have readily adopted the new and more efficient business models, captured consumer markets, and are reaping handsome profits. Some newspapers may still have time to adapt.

- Prof. Vin Crosbie, now teaching New Media Business at S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, after 30 years in the daily newspaper business.

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"instead study and follow how publishers and broadcasters in Europe and Asia, and even in North America, have utilized the Web quite profitably."

Er, sorry, but the only ones making a profit are the ones rampantly 'aggregating' other peoples' content!

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Newspapers are in trouble because they fancied themselves big business movers and shakers. They leveraged themselves too much, instead of keeping the focus on the quality of their product. If they fell back in love with journalism instead of the corporate-wide bottom line, their readers would fall back in love with them. But our affections, long abused, have moved on.

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Websites will stop linking to newspapers that sue. This will cause fewer hits to the newspapers' websites. This will cause the value of the newspapers' websites to fall. This will surely make the ad sales department happy.

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I moved to NYC in 1972 and became a loyal NY Times subscriber. I stopped subscribing about a decade ago and don't even look at it on the internet often. It's been sad watching places like the Times and Wapo try to beat each other to the bottom of the journalistic barrel but that's what has happend. Real journalism has moved to outfits like Salon and Huffington where full stories get covered and the reported isn't afraid to call BS what it is.
Why would anyone spend money on Tripe?

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"once it gets put out there..."

Maybe I'm missing something here, but don't the newspapers have control over that part? If that's what newspapers feel is the crux of the issue, then there's a _real_ easy solution: don't "put it out there".

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"Google picks it up..."

Last time I looked all you had to do was put a flag in a exclusion file to stop search engines like google accessing your site. Here's a link to '6 methods to control what and how your content appears in search engines'
www.antezeta.com/blog/avoid-search-engine-indexing

But of course that's not what these folks want. They want a bigger slice of the google pie.

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Thanks, Hey Hey, but do your research before you posting.

Many newspapers, such as those owned by Shibsted in Scandinavia or those own by Prisacom in Spain, anare doing very quite with their Web sites. Try Harvard Business School's case study of Shibsted mastery of New Media as a primer http://bit.ly/3OLkHp .

Shibstead will likely make half of its gross revenues this year from newspaper Web sites and, unlike most newspapers here, that's not because its printed editions are failing. That's new revenue.

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The "change" to copyright law that they are talking about has nothing to do with copyright, which covers expression, but instead is something like a patent on facts. If you parse what Klein and others are saying, it's not that anyone (significant) is outright copying their articles, but that bloggers and others are re-reporting the facts that are contained in the articles. That is perfectly legal. The newspapers would like to make it illegal. Essentially, they would own the facts for some period of time.

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If they're going to expand copyright protection for newspapers, it should also include blogs, Twitters, videos, etc., that journalists are exploiting for their product.

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