Cleveland Plain Dealer: Tighter Copyright Law Could Save Newspapers
Cleveland partner David Marburger was quoted in a June 28, 2009, Cleveland Plain Dealer column, "Tighter Copyright Law Could Save Newspapers."
According to the column's author, the business model which has sustained newspapers for decades is threatened, and in danger of collapse, due to internet news aggregators which reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can't match.
The columnist agrees with the ideas put forth by Marburger, an authority on litigating legal issues arising from the content side of the communications industry, and his brother—an Economics professor—in a proposal suggesting a change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators' stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.
According to Marburger, a panel discussion about newspapers' future sparked his idea on how to save them. "I heard [Plain Dealer Editor] Susan Goldberg talking about how revenue from online advertising is pathetically low and newspapers can't recoup their investment. As soon as she said it, the wheels started turning. You have all these free riders like 'Daily Beast' and 'Newser' and local television stations aggregating your stories online while diverting readers and advertisers from your site. And they're doing it for a fraction of the cost of the newspapers that generated the original copy. And it hit me: All those theories out there on how to prop up newspaper—why isn't anyone saying this? Why aren't we talking about how this free-riding by aggregators affects the market rate for everyone?"
Marburger continued: "Free-riding is ubiquitous. These parasitic aggregators are capturing the heart of the stories so that readers have no need to visit the site of the original story. It's unfair competition with unjust enrichment. If the copyright law doesn't open the way for originators of news to stop the free-riding, newspapers will die," Marburger said. "No exceptions."
To read the full article from the Plain Dealer website, including a link to Marburger's proposal, click here.