Category Archives: Intellectual Property

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They’ll Pay for This!

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So news is going around that billionaire media magnate Rupert Murdoch is not only going to begin charging for all online content at his various media properties (which include The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post in the United States, and The Sun and The Times in the United Kingdom), but he is also going to try to stop Google from referencing any of this content in news searches. Somehow, that this news broke the same week Jim Carrey’s A Christmas Carol topped the box office in the U.S. seems like not much of a coincidence.

Alas, I digress. Murdoch has long advocated a pay model for fixing what’s wrong with the business of print media. He is onto something, at least in theory, when he says that if content is good enough, then people will pay for it. However, he seems to have overlooked a few things. One, The Wall Street Journal went this same route about a decade ago and was ignored in such droves that it eventually abandoned the practice. And this was at a time when online consumption of print media was a small fraction of what it is today, so expecting people to go full reverse against a much stronger freebie culture seems optimistic, to say the least.

And that is the situation for a respected media brand such as the Journal. What of the Post? From my own experience, the Post is best known for trumping the New York Daily News in sensational headlines, as well as providing train commuters with some light (read: brain-dead) reading to occupy them after a long day of work. I know my senior designer for the magazine reads Page Six on her lunch break; surely she can watch Hulu or read any other website when Rupert tries to charge her a buck a day or whatever the going rate will be.

The point is, I see where Rupert is coming from, but the world of media is changing too fast for a stark policy such as this to succeed. If he wants to restrict his online offerings, then simply don’t puiblish your entire print edition online. Make there be some exclusive content to the print edition and run the online version as a free loss leader to get people to subscribe. Or something like that. I can’t pretend to have all of the answers here, but I know that when the WSJ starts spamming me to buy its online version, I’ll be only too happy to tell them to unsubscribe me from their mailing list, too.

For a better take on this than I can muster, check out our cover story from earlier this year on old media and new opportunities. Clay Shirky’s the real expert on this, and if Murdoch was serious about protecting his investments, he’d bring on Clay as an advisor.

The $2 Million Playlist

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musicBack in December 2007, we reported on the case of Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota woman who was found liable for copyright infringement in the first (and still only) music piracy case to go to trial in the United States. Thomas had been found guilty of downloading and distributing 24 songs on the now-defunct file sharing network Kazaa and was ordered to pay $220,000 to the recording industry for her transgression.

Evidently, the story did not end there, however. After determining that he had given incorrect instructions to the jury in the original case, the judge ordered a new trial. This second trial did not go so well for Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) and on Thursday, the new jury hit her with a $1.92 million fine, or $80,000 per song. While the judgment was less than the $150,000 per song maximum allowed by law, it was significantly more than the average $3,500 settlement reached in the more than 30,000 similar lawsuits that never went to trial (and obviously more than the 99 cents per song it would have cost to acquire the tracks legally).

In repsonse to the verdict, Thomas-Rasset told reporters that she had no intention of paying the fine. “There’s no way they’re ever going to get that,” she said. “I’m a mom, limited means, so I’m not going to worry about it now.”

Although the case seems like an obvious win for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in its fight against music piracy, some analysts, such as New York attorney Ray Beckerman, believe the verdict may do the RIAA more harm than good.

“Oddly, this gigantic verdict may do more to hurt than help the RIAA, because it offers a vivid demonstration of how out of synch the RIAA’s damages theory is with decades of case law about the reasonableness requirement for copyright statutory damages,” Beckerman said.

The size of the award also goes against a century of case law “deeming punitive awards unconstitutional if they are unreasonably disproportionate to the actual damages sustained.”

Regardless of whether the verdict is ultimately overturned, however, the RIAA has said it remains willing to settle.