Dominic Young
Writings and more
Category: Copyright
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Meltwater have followed up their defeat in a series of British courts with a defeat in an American court. AP sued them for copying AP stories, and they won. In the opinion which accompanied the summary judgement (I’ll look for it online, I have an emailed copy), the judge is scathing about almost every point…
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There has been a lot going on, and I have been keeping my thoughts to myself. For the most part, it’s a bit depressing. The UK government (PDF link) is still seeking to change the law so that new exceptions (aka appropriations) to copyright can be introduced whimsically by politicians without bothering to trouble parliament…
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Google have released a new thingy, which allows people to save web content to their Google Drive (Google’s cloud-based storage thing), and do various things to it like add comments and annotations. Nothing much unusual about that, and there are lots of similar things out there like the formerly discussed bo.lt. Not to mention every…
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After the revelation that withdrawing from Google News seems to do little (if any) damage to publishers, Eric Schmidt has been in France trying to persuade the President not to allow news publishers to charge Google for including their content on Google News. Google says such a move would “threaten the very existence” of Google.…
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Well that didn’t take long. Apparently the Brazilian boycott of Google News has cost them just 5% of their traffic. They think that’s “a price worth paying”. I’d say so too. I don’t know how their revenues stack up but I would be surprised if the financial cost was much greater than zero. As Techcrunch…
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Here’s an odd press release put out by the European Commission. It contains what it says are ten “facts” about the media and content industries. Strangely, the release doesn’t back up any of these “facts” with “evidence”, “research” or “sources” (other than a tiny link to this page which in turn puffs a report which…
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Brazilian newspapers have, en masse, withdrawn their content from Google News. The response, not least from Google itself, is the usual mix of unhelpful and self-interested grandstanding. Google’s comparison of themselves to a cab driver bringing customers to a restaurant is particularly absurd, since most restaurants want customers who can pay, and aren’t interested in…
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An obscure and technical piece of copyright law has been stretched out of recognition by the aspirations of entrepreneurs. What is the “temporary copying exception” to copyright and what was it really supposed to do? I sometimes wonder whether the history we are taught would be recognised by the people who were actually there. Recently,…
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David Leigh came up with an idea to “save newspapers”. Every broadband customer would be forced to pay £2 per month to fund newspapers. Lots was subsequently written about it, most of it contemptuous. The problems with this idea are so obvious and numerous that I didn’t bother writing anything about it to add to…
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Several people have drawn my attention to this article on GigaOm talking about content farms as a democratising force for journalism. Content farms have been criticised for turning content into a commodity, where quantity and optimisation matter more than quality. I think this is, to quite a large extent, right. Anyone can churn out articles…
Dominic Young 