Reactions to the Associated Press, hNews and microformatting
Value Added News is all the rage in big media blogs this week.
Or, more accurately, it’s prompting all the rage.
Together with The Associated Press, Value Added News, part of a London nonprofit called Media Standards Trust, has developed and released a digital rights management system called hNews.
The behemoth wire service announced mid-July that it will by 2010 fully implement hNews and then take action against bloggers who re-use content in a way that violates the AP’s terms of use. Spam bloggers in particular will draw the ire of the AP, one vice president of global development at AP told CJR.
This DRM tool is the result of a $350,000 USD Knight News Challenge grant won by Tim Berners-Lee and longtime journalist Martin Moore. According to their winning pitch: “The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of ‘source tagging.’”
Prominent blog sites like TechCrunch, BuzzMachine, BoingBoing and the Online Journalism Blog have posted reactions ranging from sceptical to dismissive about hNews, a microformatting product.
“A microformat, for those of you who aren't all geeked out, is a way of adding hints to HTML markup so that Web spiders and other software can precisely discover facts without having to guess,” writes media strategist and blogger Steve Yelvington. “This is a name. That is an address. And so forth.”
In its press release about hNews, the AP describes it as a kind of “‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework” for content. This wrapper will contain the “permissions” information that allows the AP to label the way in which it wishes its content to be used.
“This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users,” writes Ed Felten of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. “But read the fine print.”
It’s good to point out here that traditionally, the only wrappers newspaper people are used to handling are ad wrappers. This is likely why, to the amusement of Boing Boing, TechCrunch and Wired, this DRM scheme is at first examination not going to do what the AP says it will.
From Wired, pointing out two serious flaws:
“Nothing in copyright law requires a blogger or commenter to include the meta-tags if they use an excerpt in a blog post. In fact for a blogger to comply, they’ll have to do more than just cut and paste – they will have to view the source code on a newspaper’s site, search through the HTML and javascript to find the text of the story and its micro-formats. Once the thief has gone to this trouble the purloined story will call home to report where it is being re-printed, via a Web Bug url embedded in the story. Only then would The News Registry even be aware of this use.”
From BoingBoing, questioning the contents of the “wrapper”:
“hNews does include a "rights" field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users' rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.”
From TechCrunch, equally nonplussed:
“As I recall similar systems were implemented by websites back in the days of AOL. They didn't work because you could just view the source code or, interestingly enough, take a screen shot.”
Competitors of the AP are taking an alternative path to DRM, joining the Fair Use Consortium. It’s a group of 1,000 publishers including Thomson Reuters, Huffington Post, Politico, and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
The Fair Use Consortium is founded by Attributor, a tool which trawls the Internet monitoring how content is re-used. Consortium members may use the “Attributor Remedy Platform to send Removal Notices” to offending remixers.
The group has in late July announced a partnership with AdBrite, an advertising network.
Jonathan Bailey, a copyright blogger and EJC contributor, writes:
“Though few details about the deal are available, Iggy Fanlo, CEO at Adbrite, said that, ‘We see the Fair Syndication Consortium as an opportunity to increase monetization for original content while providing our publishers with an opportunity to leverage premium content on their sites.’”
Indeed, the focus of Attributor and hNews alike seems to be recuperating thousands of euro in lost revenue. According to a Neiman Journalism Lab blogger, “Attributor CEO Jim Pitkow estimated that publishers are losing a total of $250 million annually to splogs and other sites that copy their content.”
Fuzzy math?
Or, more accurately, it’s prompting all the rage.
Together with The Associated Press, Value Added News, part of a London nonprofit called Media Standards Trust, has developed and released a digital rights management system called hNews.
The behemoth wire service announced mid-July that it will by 2010 fully implement hNews and then take action against bloggers who re-use content in a way that violates the AP’s terms of use. Spam bloggers in particular will draw the ire of the AP, one vice president of global development at AP told CJR.
This DRM tool is the result of a $350,000 USD Knight News Challenge grant won by Tim Berners-Lee and longtime journalist Martin Moore. According to their winning pitch: “The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of ‘source tagging.’”
Prominent blog sites like TechCrunch, BuzzMachine, BoingBoing and the Online Journalism Blog have posted reactions ranging from sceptical to dismissive about hNews, a microformatting product.
“A microformat, for those of you who aren't all geeked out, is a way of adding hints to HTML markup so that Web spiders and other software can precisely discover facts without having to guess,” writes media strategist and blogger Steve Yelvington. “This is a name. That is an address. And so forth.”
In its press release about hNews, the AP describes it as a kind of “‘wrapper’ that includes a digital permissions framework” for content. This wrapper will contain the “permissions” information that allows the AP to label the way in which it wishes its content to be used.
“This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users,” writes Ed Felten of Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. “But read the fine print.”
It’s good to point out here that traditionally, the only wrappers newspaper people are used to handling are ad wrappers. This is likely why, to the amusement of Boing Boing, TechCrunch and Wired, this DRM scheme is at first examination not going to do what the AP says it will.
From Wired, pointing out two serious flaws:
“Nothing in copyright law requires a blogger or commenter to include the meta-tags if they use an excerpt in a blog post. In fact for a blogger to comply, they’ll have to do more than just cut and paste – they will have to view the source code on a newspaper’s site, search through the HTML and javascript to find the text of the story and its micro-formats. Once the thief has gone to this trouble the purloined story will call home to report where it is being re-printed, via a Web Bug url embedded in the story. Only then would The News Registry even be aware of this use.”
From BoingBoing, questioning the contents of the “wrapper”:
“hNews does include a "rights" field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users' rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.”
From TechCrunch, equally nonplussed:
“As I recall similar systems were implemented by websites back in the days of AOL. They didn't work because you could just view the source code or, interestingly enough, take a screen shot.”
Competitors of the AP are taking an alternative path to DRM, joining the Fair Use Consortium. It’s a group of 1,000 publishers including Thomson Reuters, Huffington Post, Politico, and Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
The Fair Use Consortium is founded by Attributor, a tool which trawls the Internet monitoring how content is re-used. Consortium members may use the “Attributor Remedy Platform to send Removal Notices” to offending remixers.
The group has in late July announced a partnership with AdBrite, an advertising network.
Jonathan Bailey, a copyright blogger and EJC contributor, writes:
“Though few details about the deal are available, Iggy Fanlo, CEO at Adbrite, said that, ‘We see the Fair Syndication Consortium as an opportunity to increase monetization for original content while providing our publishers with an opportunity to leverage premium content on their sites.’”
Indeed, the focus of Attributor and hNews alike seems to be recuperating thousands of euro in lost revenue. According to a Neiman Journalism Lab blogger, “Attributor CEO Jim Pitkow estimated that publishers are losing a total of $250 million annually to splogs and other sites that copy their content.”
Fuzzy math?
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