Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » Copyright

Beet.TV: David Westin on NewsRight, the new online licensing platform for news

Rachel McAthy — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:55:14 +0000

Last week, 29 news outlets announced their backing of a new independent rights clearance organisation in the US called NewsRight.

News companies which have invested in the new platform include the Associated Press, Washington Post and New York Times.

In the video below, from Beet.TV, NewsRight’s CEO David Westin (former president of ABC News) discusses the immediate plans for the organisation as well as future goals, such as working with images and video, as well as text-based news.

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#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – advice on copyright and how to claim for breach

Rachel McAthy — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:03:36 +0000

There is an informative article on the website for EPUK – Editorial Photographers United Kingdom and Ireland – which looks at what you can do if you think your copyright has been breached. As the article states, author Simon Crofts addresses: “your copyright, what you are entitled to claim from an infringer, and how to assemble and present a claim”.

Read it in full here.

Tipster: Rachel McAthy

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link – we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.Similar Posts:

Where does Twitpic row leave journalists?

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:51:47 +0000

Newspapers, broadcasters and websites are unable to publish Twitpic photos without permission from the person who owns the copyright, according to a media law specialist.

And the copyright is owned by the person who took and uploaded the photo, the founder of Twitpic, a service which allows users to append a photo or video to a tweet, has confirmed in the company’s blog.

“From what I’ve heard of the terms they are describing I don’t think that journalists can use the pictures people have uploaded to Twitpic and print or broadcast them,” media law consultant David Banks told Journalism.co.uk.

The question of the copyright of Twitpics has been answered this week and founder of Twitpic Noah Everett has apologised to users after it faced a barrage of criticism when it changed its terms leading many users to understand that Twitpic would have the right to sell users’ photos.

Twitpic users ditched their accounts in their droves in favour of alternatives, like this (really nice) option, Imgur.

“To clarify our ToS regarding ownership, you the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos, it’s your content,” Everett said on the blog.

However, by signing up to use Twitpic you agree to allow the company to distribute your images to its partners, which include celebrity photo agency WENN.

Twitpic has said that it had changed its terms to prevent the media publishing and broadcasting photographs of newsworthy events – like this Twitpic of the Hudson river plane crash – without the permission.

Writing on the Twitpic blog, founder Noah Everett said:

Our terms state by uploading content to Twitpic you allow us to distribute that content on twitpic.com and our affiliated partners. This is standard among most user-generated content sites (including Twitter). If you delete a photo or video from Twitpic, that content is no longer viewable.

Twitpic’s full terms of service are at this link.

The BBC editorial guidelines on the use of photographs from social media sites are at this link.Similar Posts:

Techdirt: New York Times lawyers shut down former staffer’s Tumblr

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:19:22 +0000

Techdirt has laid into the New York Times for sending its laywers to shut down a Tumblr blog belonging to former staffer Jonathan Paul. Paul was using the account to repost some of the NYT’s “beautiful and unexpected imagery”, with links.

Paul notes that the blog actually had a decent following within the NYT, and his former colleagues had encouraged the project and helped promote it as well, fully realizing that it was helping their own work get more attention and driving more traffic to the NYT. And then the lawyers stepped in.

Full post on Techdirt at this linkSimilar Posts:

paidContent: Briefing.com settles in Dow Jones hot news case

Rachel McAthy — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 12:30:32 +0000

Market analysis news provider Briefing.com has settled a copyright and ‘hot news misappropriation’ lawsuit brought against it by Dow Jones & Company, according to a paidContent report.

‘Hot news’ describes a contentious legal doctrine designed to prevent news organisations from re-reporting or republishing time-sensitive news gathered by others within a certain period.

The sum, which is undisclosed, was reportedly paid following claims the site had published Dow Jones stories without consent.

With such clear evidence of cutting-and-pasting, Dow Jones could have won its suit with a copyright claim alone. But it’s telling that the wire service insisted on suing over—and forced Briefing.com to admit it had violated—the hot news claim as well. It suggests that the news service may be trying to put itself in a strong position to file more hot news lawsuits in the future.

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Creative Commons releases new mark for public domain content

Laura Oliver — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 11:30:57 +0000

Creative Commons has released a new label for works that are free of known copyright restrictions. The Public Domain mark will make it easier for internet users to find copyright-free material and CC says it will increase the value of the public domain.

The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality … Marking and tagging works with information about their copyright status is essential. Computers must be able to parse the public domain status of works to communicate its usefulness to the public. The metadata standard underpinning the Public Domain Mark and all of CC’s licensing and legal tools are what makes this possible.

Full post on Creative Commons at this link…Similar Posts:

Photography campaign group launches new copyright proposals; ‘National Cultural Archive’ among plans

Judith Townend — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:56:49 +0000

Earlier this year the stop43 campaign successfully campaigned against the introduction of Clause 43 in the Digital Economy Bill, arguing that the legislation would take away the rights of photographers and artists.

Campaigners, which included members of the Association of Photographers, the British Institute of Professional Photography, the British Press Photographers’ Association, Copyright Action, EPUK, the National Union of Journalists and Pro-Imaging, were worried that proposals to collect a fee for commercial use of works whose creator could not be identified (so-called “orphan works”) were in the interest of commercial publishers rather than the original producer.

They got their way, and Clause 43 was removed from the Bill, before it became an Act.

While Clause 43 may be dead, Stop43 isn’t and it has been developing a ‘New Thinking’ proposal, to take to the new coalition government.

Stop43 supporter and photographic consultant Pete Jenkins told Journalism.co.uk that parliament will again be looking at orphan works and copyright, after the summer. “[W]e need to ensure that they are working on the right models – that is models that are creator friendly rather than publisher friendly as witnessed in the past,” he said.

The campaign has now unveiled its new proposal, which lays out plans for “cultural use” of orphan works, “and for this cultural use to switch all other uses and users to “known” works, to stimulate cultural and economic activity to the benefit of everyone”.

To enable this we propose some changes to current copyright law and the establishment of a National Cultural Archive, which must be free to use.

The group will continue its efforts to replace “inequitable and unworkable proposals” in the failed Clause 43, says Paul Ellis, co-founder of Stop43, in the latest announcement. The New Thinking proposal, he believes, “should benefit everyone”.

The Conservatives promised in their manifesto to introduce an Intellectual Property Act and we would like our proposal to be incorporated into that Act.

Although our proposal concerns itself with photography we believe it could easily be extended to all media types to create a massive cultural and economic resource of immense value, and Stop43 is eager to work with creators active in other media to achieve this.

This proposal was first introduced at the 2nd National Photography Symposium at the beginning of May, and was received well, with almost unanimous support, says the group.

The proposal has three parts [PDF at this link]

The arguments against Clause 43′s proposals.
The National Cultural Archive
Background information: the characteristics of digital media and networking, how digital intellectual property is used, and the different photography markets

Jenkins is optimistic that the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat government will listen. “[P]ersonally I am hopeful that we (photographers) will get a better response from the new government than we did with the old regime,” he said.

But there are challenges, Jenkins warns, citing the British Library’s recently announced partnership with DC Thompson’s brightsolid, as an example. Plans to digitise newspapers and make the British Newspaper archive available to the public for a fee, trouble him.

Whilst their initial efforts involve out of copyright material, if all goes to plan it will not be long before the partnership is digitising work which is in copyright. Although questions have been asked of the British Library as to the clearance of copyright they have refused to answer any of them.

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Freelancers step up campaign against Bauer contracts

Judith Townend — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:30:13 +0000

Freelancers at Bauer Media are continuing to protest against new contracts which they claim remove copyright from contributors.

The freelancers say that Q and Kerrang! started enforcing the contract yesterday. “Freelances who haven’t signed can’t get work from either title as of now,” the group said, via Twitter.

Tonight (5 May) there will be a meeting for all Bauer contributors in London. Details can be found at http://www.londonfreelance.org/fl/1005grab2.html.

Last week the National Union of Journalists, which is supporting the campaign, said that over 200 freelance journalists are challenging the new contracts. “The impasse has reached crisis point,” says the NUJ.

For the back story and Bauer’s own statement, issued last month, follow this link.Similar Posts:

AP to launch copyright tracking system on 14 July

Laura Oliver — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:21:05 +0000

The Associated Press will launch its news registry on 14 July, opening it up to all members and publishers who want to sign up before the end of 2010, the agency has announced.

The new system will automatically notify the agency and members about how their content is used beyond their own websites. It also stores information identifying each piece of AP content distributed and its terms of use.

The registry will make use of the new microformat for metadata introduced by the AP earlier this month, which has been added to all its news stories online to encourage an industry standard for tagging.

“Beyond analytics, the registry also will set the stage for a new way of doing business as a cooperative,” says Tom Curley, AP president and CEO, in a release.

“Every content creator who uses the registry will be able to set the rights for the use of that content, so that it can be copied legally or used in new products that the industry or others create with proper permission and compensation.”

More than 200 AP member newspapers have signed up as beta testers of the system and the agency expects this number to reach 600 by the July launch date.Similar Posts:

paidContent:UK: Times Online blocks news aggregator Meltwater

Laura Oliver — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 09:00:25 +0000

Following its decision in January to block the NewsNow news monitoring site, Times Online has blocked fellow news aggregator Meltwater.

Meltwater is the only aggregation service that has not complied with a new system introduced by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) at the start of 2010, which includes charging sites that crawl newspaper websites and use this information as part of a commercial service to clients.

Meltwater is taking the NLA to a copyright tribunal and on Monday was told its challenge would go ahead with a procedural hearing in June 2010 and a trial in February 2011.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

HTFP: Wales on Sunday pays BNP for copyright breach

Laura Oliver — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:27:16 +0000

Trinity Mirror has made an out-of-court settlement with the British National Party after a breach of copyright in an article published last November.

The piece included a picture of BNP West Wales party organiser Roger Phillips, taken by a party official, which the BNP said was taken from Facebook without permission.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

The Bookseller: Supreme Court resurrects $18m settlement between publishers and freelancers

Laura Oliver — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:36:07 +0000

An $18 million settlement between freelancer writers and a group of US publishers, which was thrown out after objections by some of the writers involved, has been revived by the US Supreme Court.

The writers, including freelancers who did and some who did not copyright their work, took the action against publishers including the New York Times Co., Dow Jones and News Corporation claiming copyright infringement by the use of their work in digital archives and databases.

As the Bookseller explains:

The case dates backs more than 10 years and has implications for how publishers can digitally use content that was originally supplied only for print publication. The settlement was reached in 2005 after about four years of negotiations over writers’ claims that their contracts did not allow for publication of their work electronically. This followed a 2001 Supreme Court ruling in favour of six freelance authors claiming copyright infringement in The New York Times Company v. Tasini. The publisher had won the original case.

The Supreme Court’s decision will not change the original terms of the settlement, says the Bookseller, but its revival could resolve some holes in the publishers’ archive benefitting both readers and news groups, says the New York Times.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

News International steps up blocking of aggregators

Laura Oliver — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:36:00 +0000

Last week Journalism.co.uk reported that Times Online had blocked news aggregator NewsNow from crawling its website.

And now News International has followed suit with its other UK sites, News of the World and The Sun (hat tip to Malcolm Coles for alerting us to this development). Both are now blocking NewsNow’s crawlers.

Last month NewsNow dropped links to the sites of 18 newspapers publishers from its subscription service ahead of the introduction of new charges by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) for aggregators and media monitoring services using newspaper website links in their paid-for services. Links to the Times’ site were not dropped however.

The aggregator also claimed it was facing legal pressure from newspaper groups to remove links.

Last week Struan Bartlett, managing director of NewsNow, made his feelings on NI’s decision clear:

NewsNow and other aggregation businesses will ride the wave, but I am concerned that key freedoms people enjoy, to access publicly available information on the internet using an independent search engine of their choice, are being eroded

But in a statement given to Journalism.co.uk, News International’s reasons for blocking the aggregator hinge on the use of links to its websites within NewsNow’s paid-for service:

NewsNow has been using Times Online content as part of its paid-for, commercial as well as free services. They have continued to do so despite our direct requests for them to stop. As a result, we have taken the decision to disallow their indexing of our content. News International makes a significant investment in journalism and we believe that it is entirely appropriate for us to ask that our rights are respected. NewsNow has acknowledged that they require our permission to use our content and, in the absence of our permission, has ceased to do so.

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NLA suspends payment of new link charges for aggregators

Laura Oliver — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:19:57 +0000

Yet another twist in the ongoing dispute over new charges affecting media monitoring services and aggregators introduced by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) this year.

From 1 January the NLA started charging sites, including aggregators, that link to newspaper websites and articles as part of their paid-for services.

The organisation, which is owned by eight UK national newspaper publishers, is only targetting commercial services so as to recoup some revenue from the use of newspapers’ online content.

But the NLA has announced it will suspend invoicing for these charges until the results of a copyright tribunal. The NLA has been taken to the tribunal by Meltwater, the Norwegian-owned media monitoring firm that has not agreed to the NLA’s new system, is taking the NLA to a UK copyright tribunal, arguing that it is equivalent to a stealth tax and not supported by English law.

“Meltwater’s position is that end users do not need a licence to simply receive links and read articles on the NLA’s members’ websites, and we welcome the NLA’s reasonable and proportionate response to the issue now being before the Copyright Tribunal,” said Jørn Lyseggen, CEO Meltwater Group, in a statement to Journalism.co.uk.

If the tribunal finds in favour of the NLA, the agency will backdate payments to 1 January 2010. The date for the tribunal has not yet, but an NLA spokesman said the agency hoped it would be completed by the end of the year.

“We are confident that the copyright tribunal will recognise our web licensing scheme is measured and reasonable. But we do not want any licensed users of newspaper web monitoring to be disadvantaged by Meltwater’s action. Clients of all
monitoring agencies should be on a level playing field. We have therefore decided not to invoice clients for their web licence until the copyright tribunal process is complete,” says David Pugh, managing director of the NLA, in a release.

Meltwater is one of only a small number of services that have refused the NLA’s new fees. News aggregator NewsNow was forced to drop some links to newspaper sites from its paid-for aggregation service as a result of the new system and last month launched a campaign calling for search engines, aggregators and other websites to be legally protected when linking to other online material using a headline, short quote or summary with attribution.

Commenting on the NLA’s decision to suspend invoicing, Struan Bartlett, managing director of NewsNow, said: “‘Measured and reasonable’ are the last two words I would choose to describe the NLA web licensing scheme. One might read it that this move by the NLA indicates they think there is a risk that they will lose the case, and that in that event they would not want to be burdened with having to repay fees wrongly claimed from businesses.”Similar Posts:

NewsNow re-enters newspaper linking fight with campaign; Meltwater takes NLA to copyright tribunal

Laura Oliver — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:05:03 +0000

NewsNow, the online news aggregator which this week said it would drop links to some newspaper sites from its paid-for service, has now launched a campaign calling for search engines, aggregators and other websites to be legally protected when linking to other online material using a headline, short quote or summary with attribution.

The Right2Link campaign, while not aimed directly at the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) has no doubt been sparked by the ongoing dispute between NewsNow and the agency over its plans to introduce a licensing system for commercial services, such as aggregators, using links to newspaper websites from January 2010, which forced NewsNow to remove some links.

“Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, as well as other new economy businesses that act as portals and link aggregators, occupy a key role in identifying links that are of interest to be read and passed on. They are a key part of the world wide web’s system of circulating information,” says a press release from the campaign.

The campaign also attacks representatives from print media groups that demand organisations obtain permission to use links to their newspapers’ websites.

But this isn’t what the NLA is asking for. It only wants to regulate areas where the newspaper links are being used for commercial gain and is a supporter NewsNow’s non-commercial services, for example its free feeds to consumers, it says.

Online media monitoring firm Meltwater, which is also signed up to the campaign but has not agreed to the NLA’s new system, is taking the NLA to a UK copyright tribunal arguing that the new system is equivalent to a stealth tax and not supported by English law.

“We use sophisticated search algorithms to help our clients find content they otherwise would have difficulties locating. The NLA’s attempt to license our clients is essentially a tax on receiving these internet links. This fee is not only unjust and unreasonable, it is contrary to the very spirit of the internet,” argues Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater Group, in a statement.Similar Posts: