NPR "On the Media": Copyright Flack
Cleveland partner David Marburger was featured on the July 24, 2009, edition of National Public Radio's "On the Media" program. Marburger discussed the recent analyses he and his brother Daniel Marburger, an economist at Arkansas State University, produced which concluded the redistribution of news on thousands of websites across the Internet is hurting newspapers financially and that the fault lies with the Copyright Act.
According to Marburger, "the state of the law is, is troubling, because the Copyright Act, which we all think of as protecting expression, actually has a negative impact on people who invest money to originate expression. The Copyright Act says that I, the originator, must allow the aggregator to take my work for nothing, and without my consent, and to allow that aggregator to merely rewrite it a little bit, rephrase it and compete directly against me, in real time, for advertisers and readers, and on the exact same medium."
Asked what he would change in the copyright law, Marburger said, "My change of rule would be simple. It'd be a single sentence: The Copyright Act does not abolish common-law or statutory unfair competition and unjust enrichment, regardless of whether the publication infringes copyright. That's all we suggest. There's only one business in the United States to which common-law unfair competition, and this species of it doesn't apply, only one, and that's the daily news business."
To listen to the interview from the NPR website, or to view a transcript of the discussion, please click here.