Commented on “How (and why) to replace the AP” at buzzmachine.com


My comment on Jeff Jarvis blog post on APs news registry and tracking proposal:

Update: This comment never made it through moderation :-(

Jeff, some remarks from germany:

1)  Wrt. Hamburger Erklärung: In contrast to the US,  in germany there is a supreme court decision dated  in 2000 (or was it 2001?), the so called “Paperboy / Paperball” decision , that ok’s  the use of headline, text snippets and deep link  on news aggregators sites. Things are completely different  for images.

Hence the german publisher have no “attack vector” from this angle. So they lobby hard  to come up with some new rights as “Werkmittler” and change so law  in order to  get new rulings that overcome the paperpoy decision. Basically that is the essence / background of the Hamburg declaration.

2) You can find more stuff about the Hamburger Erklärung as well as the differences betwenn the englich and the german version on my blog http://relations.ka2.de/2009/07/14/hamburg-declaration-wording/ and  http://relations.ka2.de/2009/06/10/hamburger-erklaerung-wortlaut/ (german). BTW: the english version is already way better than the german version

3) Tracking the use and sharing of the content and then sharing of the revenues  as described in the blog post is IMHO the basic idea of  fairsyndicaton.org. But running the infrastructure is expensive and getting the ad networks to sign up is difficult. But fairsyndication.org already gained some momentum.

So from a foreigners perspective in the US its now an arms race between the AP news registry and fairsyndication.org.

4) I think the best way  to do reverse syndication between media outlets is to go the NYT and especially the Guardian route and offer an API for accessing the content. The problem with this is that each media company right now is coming up with its own APi and content / wire format.

Hence the microformat  for news proposed by AP  and the Media Standards Trust  is very interesting to me and should not be intermixed with the active tracking of the content (which IMHO) is a difficult thing to achieve if you have to deal with non-cooperative “customers”.

The worst thing that could happen ist that the tracking part has a negative impact on the microformat proposal. Unfortunately it is also the most likely thing to happen.

5) There is already a de facto news registry: It is called Google News.  They also have the technology for tracking content re-use on a web scale, as a scientific paper called “Detecting the origin of text segments efficiently” www2009.eprints.org/7/1/p61.pdf (PDF) from this years W3C conference shows.

Bold / Crazy idea: Maybe Google should consider to move Google News under the non-profit google.org (set up a dedicated non-profit rights registry, optimally omitting the problems they have with the BRR). They could even leave their AP licensed news at news.google.com  and monetise it.