BANGKOK POST GETS TOUGH ON COPYRIGHT
ThaiVisa.com, a popular expat forum, has been effectively banned from allowing its members to re-post content from The Bangkok Post.
The ThaiVisa story says that Post Publishing has: ".. joined the 'Society for Online News Providers', and their policy is apparently that RSS feeds are the only way for other web sites to republish news articles."
Exactly one week ago I wrote about Thai publishers getting together to protect their online content. This appears to be the first step. The notice apparently applies to all websites that have previously re-posted content from The Bangkok Post.
With my publishers' hat on I entirely support any clampdowns on websites that reproduce content that costs a great deal to produce. But the wider issue here is not copyright; it's about declining advertising revenues. If someone can read a story without visiting the publishers website or buying the print product then that publisher is being deprived of income.
Over the coming weeks and months we will see more publishers taking similar actions to protect their content, especially as more adopt ways to make money from their online offerings.
The big question for me will be how strictly and how aggressively will publishers enforce their copyright?
7 comments:
i think the papers should provide solutions for this problem. like widgets that are only presenting a teaser with link to the real article and that are easy to embedd. to spread parts of your content over the web is very beneficial, but i understand the issues for the publishers.
Thanks Jan. That's a good idea. I think some publishers already do that, although in Thailand I personally think many publishers are way behind the curve in terms of what needs to be done online.
I actually get annoyed at quasi-publishers such as Thaivisa.com and others who very very happily just take other people's intellectual property and paste slabs of it on their websites/newsletters. The creation of that content is not free and in taking it, an act of theft if being committed. I can't see what is so controversial. It's OK to quote (fair use is an established concept) and link, it is not OK to steal. People who should know better don't get the difference.
Grahame, yes. Exactly ! I couldn't agree more with your comments. And I get equally annoyed too .. more so with Thai language publshers that think they can get away with word-for-word translations of original English stories from overseas. They think they can get away with it because of the language issue and because they think no one is watching. :-)
I'm sad to see you choose the word "re-post" in your first sentence. The more correct word would of course be "steal". You are likely correct that a decline in ad revenue for content creators is due to content theft by websites who are ignorant of the law and would not be viable if they had to license the content.
ThaiVisa is of course a bit of a special case. They represent a very attractive target because of their tie-up with The Nation. Any legal action against ThaiVisa would quickly turn up any number of legal defects in their organization.
What thaivisa has done wrong and it has affected myself too is deliberately delete all links to sites which are seen as a potential competitor. Yet, thaivisa often allows members to copy and paste blogs etc... from a 'competitor' site and even has the nerve to delete the appropriate link sometimes.
I see there is a link today on thaivisa to this site, the only reason the mods allowed it was that they were too slow off the block. Too many other comments were posted quickly, before the mods spotted it.
Meanwhile, Thaivisa has been deliberately allowing members to copy and paste others' work on the Net with no link back for too long. Their constant warning they post on threads 'Source must be....' is piss-poor. It's only when a complaint comes in about copyright infringement that they decide to post a link etc...
I am a member of Thai Visa and I have seen the way it has turned into a behemoth money making machine. It has the resources to pay but has not sought to go down that road.
As to the general issue of copyright, then we, the public have been fed the idea that online is cheap and in a news context, online is free. We are detached from the costs of journalism and it is going to be a hard task for copyright owners to put that genie back in the box and introduce revenue streams for news content. I do not see that happening,
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