Traditional Media Companies Collaborate To Protect Their Content From Bloggers

News publishers in the USA are setting up a guard dog company to protect their content.

Twenty-nine major news and information companies have signed on as initial investors and participants in NewsRight, an independent digital rights and content licensing organisation led by former ABC News President David Westin. NewsRight will ‘facilitate the use of published news content and data analytics with the permission of publishers’.

The 29 founding organisations of NewsRight publish original news reports on 841 websites representing newspapers with a combined daily circulation of more than 147 million Americans and a monthly content viewership of nearly 170 million web readers. Their initial investment demonstrates unprecedented support across the publishing industry for an easy method to control and license published digital news reports.

NewsRight President and CEO David Westin says:

More news is available more ways than ever in history. But if reliable information is to continue to flourish, the companies investing in creating content need efficient ways to license it as broadly as possible. NewsRight’s mission is to make sure consumers continue to benefit from the all the original news reporting they want while ensuring those who republish content do so with integrity.

The new company will provide new and easy ways for third parties (eg. bloggers) to purchase content for re-publication, and it will also return data to its publishers on how and where their content is being used.

“Working with NewsRight benefits digital innovators because they can license news content in their applications quickly and easily; news organisations that provide the content for those applications benefit because they can more efficiently license their content to a broader range of uses; and consumers benefit because they will have assured access to a robust supply of credible news and information in new and exciting ways,” said Mr. Westin.

The initial investors in NewsRight are: Advance Publications, The Associated Press, Axel Springer Group, A.H.Belo Management Services, Belo Management Services, Business Wire, Community Newspaper Holdings, El Dia, Galveston Newspapers, Gatehouse Media, The Gazette Company, Hearst Newspapers, Journal Communications, Landmark Media Enterprises, The McClatchy Company, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris Communications, Morris Multimedia, NPG Newspapers, The New York Times Company, Ogden Newspapers, Pioneer Newspapers, Schurz Communications, The E.W. Scripps Company, Stephens Media, Swift Communications, Times Publishing Co. and The Washington Post Company.

David Dayan, writing on the political news site Firedoglake.com suggests that by burying tracking code in their copy, the move is an attack on the legal argument of “Fair Use”. His response…

I'm wondering if any venture capitalists are interested in creating BlogRight, a monitoring service that scans the wire services and major papers for stories that they clearly ripped off from blogs without attribution or compensation, particularly those stories where the origins are described as "a blog first reported the news." Considering the frequency with which this happens, and the possibility for major embarrassment among the media gatekeepers if that information were recognized widely, I would consider the BlogRight business model to be quite lucrative.

It is likely other major news producers around the world will be watching the NewsRight model to see if it is something they might adopt. Most travel bloggers use little or no mainstream news content in their blogs, but if/when they do, they will need to be extra wary that they are not infringing copyrights.

What do you think? Can we expect to see more digital rights management companies like NewsRight in the future? And, if content creators are rushing to protect their work, what about a ‘BlogRight’?

Image: Samat Jain