The press must be protected from the internet parasites | Letters

Reward the creators, not the distributorsWill Hutton (“Are we finally reacting to the disruptive supremacy of Facebook and Google?”, Comment, last week) could have also mentioned the Gutenberg printing press, which democratised the making available of man’s creative spirit. Publishers find online professional journalism is soaring in popularity, but remuneration is elusive. However, soaring revenues go easily to dominant platforms and aggregators, which help themselves to press content through systematic “scraping” of websites, copying vast quantities of copyright-protected text, images and video, which they make available to millions without any reward going to the creators and producers of that content.The European commission has recognised that this parasitic behaviour risks the long-term impoverishment of those who invest in professional journalism, threatening jobs, titles and future innovation. It has proposed a remedy: to grant press publishers a neighbouring right (in the copyright reform package currently before the European parliament), ensuring that publishers can also monetise their content. Yet those very companies that benefit from lack of clarity about who owns the content they “scrape” have mounted a vast lobby against this. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2017-04-02 00:00:00 UTC ]

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France faces battle over ebook pricing law

Written By: Barbara Casassus Publication Date: Thu, 05/05/2011 - 09:14 France is bracing for battle with the European Commission with its government on the verge of adopting a bill allowing publishers to fix prices for all ebooks sold in France. The bill, which was approved unanimously by an... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-05 00:00:00 UTC ]
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