Disintermediation requires a networked rights and payments clearinghouse business model, just as musicians and composers have had for nearly 100 years through ASCAP (and later on BMI and SESAC, all performance-rights organizations). The AP spinoff prov…

To me, the ASCAP model is a starting point. I could have started with any of the similar clearinghouses elsewhere set up to deal with payment distributions in networks with many payers and many payees. If developed, I’m sure that the proposed news clearinghouse and pricing system would be organized and operated quite differently from ASCAP. The essential point about ASCAP is that its original idea was to create a way for open distribution of content.

This is not exactly true. First, ASCAP (and BMI and SESAC) take money from businesses that play music – with or without musicians. (They also take money from radio stations.) Second, the money the business pays to ASCAP, which isn’t much, might otherwise go to anything – from the price of an entree to the bottom line.

>>>Twenty years ago if I wanted to get this particular opinion out to the world at large my only quick option would have been to write a letter to a newspaper.

Given your lack of knowledge about the subject, I’m not sure this is a good thing.

>>>The ecosystem you propose can happen (and already happens) without an extra bureaucratic system.

Not really. Links go to referred sites, which may or may not be the originators of the story. Why not make sure the system compensates the original reporter(s)? This could – and should – help online outlets as well as newspapers.

Lastly, it is very important to remember, that this system would not require any additional law(s). ASCAP was not chartered by a law. (It operates under a consent decree, but so does Major League Baseball.) It is enforced by very clear laws that establish the public performance right. Similarly, a news version of ASCAP could be enforced under the laws that establish the rights of reproduction and distribution.

I am not saying that this is necessarily a good idea. My hunch is that it might cause more trouble than it’s worth, although it would depend on how it’s done. Like most such proposals, the devil is in the details. But it might be helpful to understand what exactly ASCAP does before weighing in on the proposal.

With government support (ie laws passed) this will be a viable business for less than 5 years. Then Hot News will go the way of music and video. Infringement, resentment at paying fees, bad publicity, and finally collapse.

Ok so you aren’t proposing to track rewrites.

” But if a rights-sharing system such as I’m suggesting were in place, they would not have to waste their time doing that; they could just use the story on a revenue sharing basis and use the time gained to create their own original content on other topics to share back into the system.”

But that happens already – without your new system. There is no need to “use the story on a revenue sharing basis” all you need to do is link back to the original and the internet traffic (and associated ad revenue) will automatically be shared.

The ecosystem you propose can happen (and already happens) without an extra bureaucratic system.

The reality is that the era of broadcast (one to many) media has been replaced by “many to many” media. Twenty years ago if I wanted to get this particular opinion out to the world at large my only quick option would have been to write a letter to a newspaper. The chances of publication would have been slim – and even then I would only have reached at most a potential readership of a few hundred thousand. Now I can write a comment on any one of a huge number of sites (like this one) and it will be published instantly to a billion potential readers. Now it may be that only a handful of people will actually read it – but that will be their choice – not the choice of an editor.

This is a huge change and it is not reasonable to expect the majority of organisations that grew up in the previous era to survive it.

However the organisations are not important – and not to be mourned. I am certain that good journalistic skills are still in demand and will continue to be so regardless of what happens to the organisations.

What I’m suggesting is a system that would enable the blogger to legitimately cut and paste the whole story, with attribution, as long as there’s either an ad revenue share or a user payment share. The originating publisher might even be able to embed an ad in the story, let the story be picked up by any blogger, aggregator or publisher in the network, with revenue from that ad shared between the originator and the blogger or other “remixer.”

Just as everybody wins when a radio station plays a song and pays the artist, everybody can win in the news ecosystem. We just need to get beyond the current proprietary containment mentality into something closer to a open source mentality.

Looking beyond what I’ve outlined, it’s even possible to envision a true open-source approach to news where multiple parties could contribute to the same piece of content with mutual benefits.

And, Rob is correct that ASCAP protects and benefits “ordinary musicians” and Elton John alike. I could be wrong but I believe there is not even a membership fee for ASCAP.

It takes money from businesses that hire musicians to play music. The money the business pays to ASCAP would otherwise go to the musicians who actually play at the venue. If those musicians play their own material then they should in theory receive money back from ASCAP out of the license paid by the venue. However, in practice that doesn’t happen at smaller, more casual venues and so the money collected goes to the big stars instead.

That said, however, why shouldn’t publishers look for ways to derive some revenue from some of that freely-circulating content? I noted that the price would often, be zero. Maybe most of the time. But a commonly recognized system (like ASCAP’s) for channeling revenue back to content originators is better than where we are now, which is that publishers are tracking “misuse” and then hiring lawyers to write nasty letters.

On the internet site of things (as opposed to broadcast and performance venues), the music industry faced this a similar problem, and gradually moved from aggressive enforcement tactics (taking college students to court) to accepting that getting paid for some downloads via iTunes is better than trying to block all downloads and filesharing.

ASCAP doesn’t take money from musicians, except for a modest membership fee that doesn’t get distributed at all. It takes money from businesses that play music and gives money to Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

SACEM, and later ASCAP and BMI, were founded precisely BECAUSE composers had lost control of distribution. They enable compensation without control. So would this. Nothing about the lack of control online in any way implies that there should be a lack of compensation.

mr. langeveld, you speak again and again of “the bounds of their own sites”, and “confine news content to tightly-controlled channels”, and the horror of “when content moves outside those bounds”, to the point where you appear risibly cervante-esque.

this network of networks against which you tilt (we call it now colloquially the internet), from it’s initial design and purpose, to its subsequent design principles (open with open standards), to the accretion of sophisticated developments, hardware and software innovations, later democratization and mass acceptance and use, all mean one thing:

you have lost control of distribution. full stop.

you can either fight to re-gain a lost nirvana of monopoly rents, or you can embrace a present and future of leveraging an infinite non-rivalrous artifact to sell something scarce and compelling.

a licensing fee (for news? really?), its attendant bureaucracy and market distortions, is neither.

I consult with newspaper publishers with another of my companies and I have been proposing the adoption of a royalties system like BMI/ASCAP in my consults to publishing houses around the world. I am going to point them to this article because many print publishers have few ideas about how music publishers earn money.

My sense is that such a licensed system might come to fruition in Europe before it ever comes to the U.S. The framework for EU copyright legislation is more consolidated and fertile here than in the the widely fragmented U.S. media market.

Licensing original compositions is a great system for the owners of the music publishing. The value for music is the long-lasting nature of the agreement and the evergreen return for songs that hold or grow value over time. Especially if another artist record a cover version of a tune. The original publisher is paid via another clearinghouse – the Harry Fox Agency.

Music publishing revenues are derived from multiple streams of revenue around one body of work.

ASCAP royalties are collected based on distribution (airplay), direct “sync” rights negotiated broadcasters and film companies who use their work in TV shows and movies, and licensing of derivative works a.k.a. (cover songs)

The key to turning this engine on is copyright. If commoditized news reports are allowed to be copyrighted then . . .

The other issue is fair use. How much can you refer to or quote from before you would have to have a sync license?

For music there are rules. News images are protected. News videos are protected. What are the rules for news text?

There are rules for people who wish to play using copyrighted music.  

There are rules for people who wish to publish news photographs

The same is, of course, true for news videos. 

But what are the rules for licensing text-based news reports? 

To make a licensing scheme work, I think you first need a legal precedent that defines what is fair use of editorial facts and what defines a derivative work of another’s original reporting.

@Rob Weir wrote:
Broken record moment: the problem with paywalls isn’t technical. It’s creating content that people will pay for.

@MartinLangeveld replies:
@robweir Yes, paywalls are not a technical challenge. Letting content atomize, travel freely, and get paid for it is.

That’s what this piece is about. I noted that publishers can do whatever they want within their own domains and syndicated streams. But the opportunity is to let content find readers outside those confines.

@MedillSchool wrote:
how news orgs can get paid http://bit.ly/bdpz4Q Seems unlikely – readers online always find free alternative; will to pay = 0

@MartinLangeveld replies:
True of most but not all. The right system will incentivize creation of content with value.

@Chanders Oh, jesus. The fucking “ASCAP for news” thing // RT @NiemanLab: How can news orgs liberate content and still get paid? http://j.mp/bQFNnD

@MartinLangeveld replies:
Why oh jesus? See comment at the post. Where has an ASCAP-like clearinghouse and an Adsense-like price mech been proposed before?

I should ignore Chanders, but I’m going to assume he hasn’t read the post. I’d react the same way if this was about the (*&%#(@ iTunes for news thing, but it’s not, and to my knowledge, the specific combination of an ASCAP-like clearinghouse and an AdSense-like auction pricing mechanism has not been suggested or knocked around before. If it has, speak up.