DRM for news? Inside the AP's plan to "wrap" its content

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/drm-for-news-inside-the-aps-plan-to-wrap-its-content.ars

by habs • 17 years ago

15 23 17 years ago

pmichaud• 17 years ago

The plan is that they have no plan. The plan is to make a bunch of aging executives look foolish after buying the snake oil off the back of some consultant's cart of tricks. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the web, its culture, and its infrastructure, and is utterly doomed to fail.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Alternate title: "How to spend a lot of money solving a non-problem."

ajp• 17 years ago

More Like "How to spend a lot of money not solving a non-problem."

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Agreed.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

They'll kill themselves. After a week or two they'll recant, a lot of $ poorer and some experience richer.

This is actually quite comparable to Ted Nelsons' project Xanadu (or at least parts of it).

wglb2• 17 years ago

Do you think that Xanadu could reasonably solve this problem?

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

Xanadu was ahead of its time in many ways, but the reason why the web took off the way it did I think has to do with the free and open nature of it.

The basic idea behind xanadu was that information could be re-cited as often as you wanted but the originator would get a slice of the cake.

The web is the opposite, it's a total free-for-all with the spammers and the parasites being on the same level as the originators of the content. Nelson saw it differently.

Early attempts at something like the web in Europe (minitel in France and videotext in the netherlands and germany) tried to charge 'by the page' for the content, but this seriously limited the amount of information available. Information providers could set a price on their information and the 'links' would display the price prior to activation. Billing was done through the telco.

If every web link came with a price attached I think it would have never gotten off the ground the way it did. Still, there are some good elements in that philosophy and I'm sure that in the long run 'for pay' links and some kind of citation mechanism will find their way back in to the web, simply because they are useful and because there is much demand for it (from the content providers side).

One potential way to realize this today is by setting up a gateway that deals with pay-per-view content where information providers could host their data and a plug-in based viewer (flash or something like it) that unlocks the content if the client has enough credits and confirms they want to see it.

I hope all of this makes sense :)

RyanMcGreal5• 17 years ago

"[C]ontent providers have the right to decide what happens to their content and on what terms".

-- Gavin O'Reilly, Chairman, Automated Content Access Protocol

If you don't want people using the content you created, you shouldn't be in the content creation business.

_pi4• 17 years ago

I've heard this statement before in many different incarnations some with intonations of piracy, some without. However they all fail to see the basis of where the other party is coming from. They want to be adequately rewarded for you using their content. However adequately differs very much from person to person, you may think that a news story costs a quarter to read, I may think it costs 15 cents, the CEO of AP may think it costs a buck fifty, and the 13 year old down the street thinks AP should pay him to read the news story.

The problem that news companies suffer that makes this a significantly different problem for them rather than a company like the RIAA is that journalists get paid by the company as a primary source of income, journalists have to get sent places which costs the company money, and the company's primary source of revenue is the output of the journalists. For a second lets forget print media ever existed, in the current state of the web where media such as this is demanded by users to be free this is a failing business because of extravagant costs, and almost no profits. Why print media is a failing is because less people buy print and more people read it online.

There are players who beat the market by having a niche audience, low costs, and a high price, ie the Economist. Unlike the NY Times or AP they didn't have to send several photographers and journalists to China several times for pre, during, and post Olympics. While I don't necessarily agree with this business model, an exchange of cash has to exist somewhere, finding where such an exchange is most acceptable is a another story.

RyanMcGreal5• 17 years ago

Market value comes from scarcity. When you need a million dollar press to print a newspaper, you can charge for it because the capital cost is a big barrier to the entry of competitors.

When the cost of printing collapses (to use the expression from Clay Shirky), the barrier to entry disappears, and the value derived from scarcity disappears with it.

AP's scheme amounts to a technical and/or legal attempt to reimpose an artificial scarcity so it can once again sell at a premium.

Their scheme is doomed.

mildweed• 17 years ago

I am pleased to see another organization adopting a 'standard' microformat, in this case, hNews.

Microformats are the bridge by which we're going to get to the truly Semantic Web.

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

Yes, this is less absurd than I thought it was going to be; it's basically a polite watermark. My guess is that they'll ignore micro-users like mini-bloggers but throw the book at any volume sites that strip the 'DRM' and recycle the content without attribution.

I think rumors of AP's suicide/death are rather overblown, and they're just looking for a way to share without giving away the farm. Of course, they might have done better to use something like a creative commons license and choose terms that would encapsulate their legitimate commercial interest. On the other hand there's no ML standard for CC licensing that I know of.

callahad2• 17 years ago

I'm stuck on the last bit of their target case:

What I'm talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don't even comment on it. And it happens way more than most people realize.

If people don't realize this is happening, how can it be a problem? If a blog without readers violates copyright, does it hurt the AP?

anigbrowl2• 17 years ago

I realize it's happening. I think what he means is that most people don't think about it much.

However, if you've used Google News for a long time after a while you notice that there's a lot of no-original-content websites masquerading as news outlets, not unlike the domain squatters with 'search result' pages for high-ranking searches. In my opinion it's a kind of black-hat SEO.

Try looking at a news story in GN and you'll see that the top story has maybe '5000 similar stories'. The first page or two will be related or fully rewritten stories, but if you go past the first 100 results you'll see a lot of junk websites that just host the top 20 news stories and monetize them with adwords. They may only make $10 a day that way, but it's diluting AP's brand a bit in the process.

callahad2• 17 years ago

That's a great point. I don't use Google News, but I can definitely see brand dilution happening in that manner.

DRM for news? Inside the AP's plan to "wrap" its content

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