regarding comment 5

get this AP sued them as well for including the proper type attribution for when AHN writers refered to the piece.. like in “the AP reported that this even happened.”

Really this looks more like a big media company trying to undermine new and more effective news channels.

Suppose, however, that we start with what I put on offer but consider it on the basis of each potential marginal user. We’re controlling for reach altogether and focusing just on the content and, essentially, whether it’s better for some users.

I think this gets at why copyright itself can’t protect the scoop owner. Copyright is essentially about *copies* in the sense of exact replicas. You can’t copyright meaning. You can only copyright the thing itself. This makes sense because unauthorized copies of a thing add zero value to world per potential marginal user. Each of those users would be equally happy with authorized copies.

In view of this, the “hot news” doctrine is just a more general expression of copyright. We don’t really care about the way information is presented, after all; we care about the information. But we also don’t want government to be involved in meting out justice based on the messy business of meaning. We’ve stuck with copyright because we’re confident that courts can reliably recognize identity but cannot reliably recognize synonymy.

It seems to me that this is an attempt by Big Media to undermine non-traditional channels, since it seems that outlets like AP, NYT, etc. cross-license each other’s content.

What I’d like to know is why copyright law is not sufficient to cover the “scoop” owner. Is the problem that of lack of attribution?

But that doesn’t work for the simple reason that we don’t really care how much value people sink into content; we care about how much value users reap from content. So the “free” in “free riding” might refer to the added value–or the lack thereof. In this light, we might say that the re-publisher would be more likely to be guilty the closer to zero the value of re-published content adds to the world.

I certainly share the shudder from the thought of further complications or broadly value expansions of copyright and similar law, but I also have little regard for services that add nothing to the world. To the extent that Techmeme filters news, adding real value by showing us what bloggers consider “hot” in a way the AP stories themselves do not, I would hope it wouldn’t be threatened by this kind of claim.

Copying stories is clearly a copyright violation. But rewriting them? I’m not sure I want the courts making that determination, especially when we’re talking about news stories that are themselves rewrites of reality.

I might accept a standard that rules out all mechanical rewriting. At the risk of discriminating against AIs, that would at least create a legally enforceable line that aligns with the spirit with copyright law.

I’m of two minds about this, on the one hand no one likes a free-loader.. on the other hand the idea that some ‘owns’ a scoop or a sports score of a game in progress is close to information insanity.

One can not simply reword/rewrite someone else’s term paper and hand it in without violating academic ethics.

The danger is in agreeing to this concept and having any associated timeline of protection indefinitely extended as we have now with copyright law. I don’t reasonably expect Mickey Mouse or Robert Frost poems to fall into the public domain in my lifetime.

So what’s a reasonable deadline for hot news to expire and how can it be made to be unextendable?