Closed Captioning of Commercial Television has been the law of the land since 1996. Its genesis was the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) which gave us wide doorways, grabbars, ramps and Handicapped Parking. Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 mandated electronic and information technology alternative delivery methods such as closed captioning by government agencies.
This included websites, which has not been adopted completely by the government, and the Flash/AJAX development crowd has swept under the rug.
Ars Technica notes that there is a new Accessibility bill introduced into the House of Representitives.
New bill mandates closed captioning for Internet video
This is a remix/refresh of the Communications Act of 1934.
While the bill can be read to only apply to commercially produced video, the line between personal and commercial has been blurring on the internet for some time. Video sharing sites like YouTube who are trying to monetize themselves may be considered commercial soon. Other sites who use pre and post roll advertisements are definitely commercial.
Most digital cameras allow you to make video, so you can be seen by millions. With this legislation, the cost of video sharing will go up. It is one thing to provide closed captioning for the twitter whore, it is another level of complicated to provide a text description of somebody doing the funky chicken while jumping off his garage.
When you have a video that gets viewed 10 million times, and the closest commercial television program only has around 5 million there will be blood. The recent Drudge Retort AP copyfight points this out quite nicely, and that is a text argument.
Sites that wrap commercials around video or use pre and post roll advertisements are gonna get whacked.
Robert Scoble and Fast Company TV probably need to budget money for captioning equipment.
If you think that this or similar legislation is not coming, just think about who gets the best parking spots at your local regional lifestyle center. Do you want to be that person who says that folks with disabilities are not equal to you?
We live in interesting times.
H.R. 6320 is here
The National Captioning Institute has a good page of the current law.
Section 508
This copyfight has no winners.
Rodgers did not win. Rodgers conformance, compliance, or capitulation, is his alone. It does not apply to you or I. It is not a victory in any real sense. The closest description is a cease fire. Hostilities will resume.
In every case it was an excerpt, which is ‘Fair Use’ and does not require the author’s permission, regardless of how much they wish to the contrary.
AP did not win because they attempted to legislate “Fair Use” by intimidation. The AP saying ‘quoting a headline and the lede paragraph of a story’ is infringement is crap. It is AP’s attempt to maintain control over it’s ‘product’, the hook and the summary, (also known as the AP Style) with a headline and first paragraph, with the rest of the story explaining the first ‘graf’. They would really like to make this Infringement, because if you quote that, the story is basically over, you have the sizzle and the steak, the rest is fat and bone.
AP will need a bunch more lawyers to file DMCA notices, because unless they go back to the teletype, and have their owner-members erect paywalls, it will be quoted.
Robert Cox gets an atta boy for his work in resolving this specific issue, Back Story on How AP and Drudge Retort Come to Terms especially in the speed of getting a large organization like the AP to make a decision without months of meetings, focus groups, and balloting, but gets a big aw shit for trying to sell us insurance, regardless of his statement of no commission.
We didn’t win, as what we think about excerpting and Fair Use is no clearer today than it was last week.
Dear Jim,
Let me call you Jim as we are kind of informal out here. You can call me alan. We are just folks out here.
(Be advised that my comments and opinions are here are mine, and are directed to you as the Vice President; Director of Strategic Planning, and are not personal attacks.)
The internet lives by the hyperlink. Think about that for a moment. Every bit of information available on the web in any format that you can see on your computer or hand held device has a hyperlinkable address. Without the hyperlink, we would not be having this discussion. That fact alone should let you know that once information hits the web, you no longer have any sort of control over its usage..
I am one of the many people who feel that you are wrong in your use of the DMCA. I thought that I had covered my thoughts sufficiently in my two previous postings.
The Death Rattle of the Associated Press
The Associated Press, Fair Use, Copyright, and the rest of us.
However a story at the New York Times website has compelled my to write again. We will get to that in a few moments. First some background.
Recent events have catapulted you and the organization you work for, the Associated Press, into a highly visible position on the world wide web. Right now this is not a good thing. You have become the news. As your members will tell you, becoming the news compromises your ability to represent the news.
At issue is your organization’s filing a DMCA notice against Rodgers Cadenhead and the Drudge Retort website for Copyright Infringement. This is like using a thermonuclear weapon to clean leaves off your driveway.
The funniest thing here is the way it was done. They cut and pasted, (which may be either scrupulous attention to detail, lazy, or a gigantic infringment as most corporations, most notably in the news and entertainment industries would have the world believe) headlines and excerpts of the articles, providing a Hyperlink to the original story, which gives credit to the source, does provide an accurate, true, and correct quote of the source material.
You should be happy. Everybody else likes links.
These conventions such as Quote, Attribution, Credit and Byline, have been adopted from the news business because they are an elegant and fair method of establishing authorship, exchanging information, giving credit, and work to eliminate confusion between what was said, and what is being debated, or commented upon. So not every thing the news business is doing is bad.
This is pretty much the way most folks point to material for commentary. Also, in the case of weblogs, allows readers to read the materials we used to form our opinions and either agree with us or tell us we are full of crap.There really is no malice or a gigantic conspiracy on the part of the millions of folks who publish on the web. It is hard to get any group of any size moving in the same direction. Herding cats is easier.
You have succeeded however.
As you are discovering, folks out here are opposed to your action. The backlash that you are currently feeling is only the tip of the electronic iceberg. What the folks on the Drudge Retort site did was Fair Use as I have come to understand and use it.
Attempting to tell millions of bloggers how and what they can do especially regarding Fair Use and Freedom of Speech is doomed.
I don’t feel that you are fully understanding the arena that you are playing in. While you were using teletypes to broadcast your ‘content’ to your 1500 members, we were building a network unlike anything the world has seen, with over 100 Million members worldwide. I may be low on the figure on our end. Maybe you should have stuck with the teletypes.
The internet is an expanding series of computers, using open protocols, to exchange information. The visible portion you are seeing is the world wide web. It is a messy place filled with words, sounds, pictures and video. We are no longer passive consumers of filtered, homogenized, spoonfed, broadcasted information. We are creators, producers, and commenter’s of information, news, and opinion.
The internet is not just a cheap pipe for you to service your membership with your output.
You have two problems to overcome.
The first problem is your business model. You collect news and information, from individual reporters, homogenize it, stripping individual credit, rewriting it, and then sell it back to your members requiring your AP byline. Which in the days before the web was a cost effective model for smaller newspapers to inform their readers about world and local events.
However with the vast amount of individual reporting on events that can be uploaded to the web in moments, the ability to hyperlink that information, so that reader/viewership numbers far outstrip any dead tree or broadcast numbers you could possibly hope for, makes your relevance problematical. The most significant fact to understand is the vast majority is created on those computers by individuals. This material is known in the news industry by the pejorative term “user generated content.”
It is not a question of veracity or professionalism, it is a question of speed, and depth.
The second problem is attempting to control its dissemination once it shows up on the web. The current boycott postings should give you an inkling of just how fast folks can spread the word.
As you can see by the postings that are the subject of this lunacy, the speed at which things can be linked and discussed should make your nose bleed and your head hurt. Right now these folks are just boycotting AP Bylined stories. What should strike terror into your heart is when they expand it to include your 1500 members. Your members are already gasping for air, as their revenue streams are drying up, circulation is diminishing, and folks are getting their news from thousand of alternative news outlets. As more and more newspapers on the web open themselves up to reader contributions, your role will diminish.
Cheaper too, as most of us do not count ‘value’ in dollars and cents.
Now to your latest faux pas.
In a story on the New York Times website titled:
The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs
there were number of quotes that you made that require commentary:
According to the story:
After that, however, the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard.
“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Gee Jim! that horse has not only left the barn but has traveled around the world. Any ’standard’ you create is going to be problematic as your organization has no business or right to define Fair Use, for anyone you do not have a contractual relationship with, whom if I am close to correct, has the ability to post the entire thing, which is what you are selling. That being said, your thinking that you are going to release ‘thoughtful standards’ that will apply to the individuals on the web is disengeous, arrogant, and doomed to failure.
Right now like the movie Untraceable, you are hanging upside down above the roto tiller, but there is no pole to save you as more and more folks log on and the cable continues its inexorable downward path.
You then went on to say:
“As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.
Since you are charging for it, it had better. Your job depends on that. And getting your members to believe that and keep those checks coming. However, that value is not measured in dollars and cents
out here. Today it may be ‘hot news’, but tomorrow it will line bird cages or wrap fish.
Also from the story is this:
One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.
You have already been paid for it at least once. It will be real hard to make a case for financial harm on that basis alone, irregardless of what percentage of a piece turns out to cross the Fair Use threshold, which at this point in time is decided on a case by case basis, requiring court action. Good Luck with that.
The final comment in the story attributed to you:
“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”
Actually, Jim you are. At the very least you are implying that we are thieves with your current interpretation of Fair Use, just like the RIAA and the MPAA.
So you can either step back and re-examine your policy, or you can hire a bunch of lawyers. Because we will hold bake sales, yard sales and tip jars, to fight this.
Your electronic pen pal
alan herrell - the head lemur
P.S. You need to double Irene Keselman’s salary, because anybody who can pull a rabbit like “Hot News Missapropriation” out of a hat, will get snatched up by some Intellectual Property Law Firm inside of 6 months tops.
Yesterday I mentioned the Main Stream Media Meltdown of the AP filing DMCA takedown notices against against Rogers Cadenhead and his community site Drudge Retort.
Shelley Powers left a comment that made me think.
“Rogers did not post enough information for any of us to form a knowledgeable opinion. What he’s done is trigger a pile on.
AP could be wrong, could be right — but we don’t have all sides of the story, we don’t even have the 7 posts, or have read all the communications.
I would think that people would appreciate getting all sides of the story before forming an opinion, wouldn’t you?”
He did post enough information on his site. The links are at the bottom of the page.
DMCA Takedown Request is here:
The Alleged Infringement is here:
AP is working under the theory that it is infringement based as far as I can see on the last sentence of the Copyright Office Fair Use definition:
“Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.”
This sentence should have special meaning for Shelley from the Lane Hartwell Copyright dustup.
Which strictly interpreted would give the AP the ‘right’, as every bit of AP work does have the All Rights Reserved Disclaimer. This however does not give them a free pass relating to Fair Use.
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Source: US Copyright Office Website
As far as the AP side of the story, this note has appeared on numerous blogs. I stole this from Matt Ingram
AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent actions with the Drudge Retort, and also reassure those in the blogosphere about AP’s view of these situations. Yes, indeed, we are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond brief references and direct links to our coverage.
The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers — large and small — in the news conversation of the day. Some of the largest blogs are licensed to display AP stories in full on a regular basis. We genuinely value and encourage referring links to our coverage, and even offer RSS feeds from www.ap.org, as do many of our licensed customers.
We get concerned, however, when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste. That’s not good for original content creators; nor is it consistent with the link-based culture of the Internet that bloggers have cultivated so well.
In this particular case, we have had direct and helpful communication with the site in question, focusing only on these issues.
So, let’s be clear: Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but Jeff Jarvis’ call for widespread reproduction of wholesale stories is out of synch with the environment he himself helped develop. There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers.
Jim Kennedy
VP and Director of Strategy for AP
Posted by: Paul Colford | June 13, 2008 11:43 AM
I have problems with the communication reportedly from the AP saying the words are from Jim Kennedy, VP and Director of Strategy, but is posted by someone calling themselves Paul Colford.
There is no disclaimer that Paul is writing for Jim, and this begs the question of whether or not Jim has his own email address or just a title. Jim Kennedy does work for the AP in that position according to the Media Center at the American Press Insitute. Paul Colford appears to be another Director of Media Relations at the AP according to this:
So the question beyond authenticity of authorship is the rambling assertion that they like bloggers, yet assert that licensing is the only true path to news nirvana.
The other nugget is the concept of “hot news misappropriation“, put forth by AP’s Intellectual Property Governance Coordinator Irene Keselman, whom if her LinkedIn profile is true is a part timer as she lists her own business as well but whose website seems to be MIA.
hot news misappropriation
It was bullshit yesterday and is bullshit today. Take for example the current situation. Every one of the alleged infringements were from sites that is paying the AP for content. The AP in reality has no standing here as it is no longer ‘hot news’. None of the infringements were sucked from the AP site. One could wonder if the AP wants to knock the RIAA off the top spot as the most reviled organization online.
Fair Use is an important part of our society, and is vital online.
Everything that is published in the United States is covered by copyright, and is also available for Fair Use. There is still no definite answer as to which percentage of an item consists of Fair Use, as some items cannot be easily chopped up into discrete bits such a photos, but a portion of a textual piece has been for many years even before the internet, has been used for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
The only argument we are having is the percentage.
The AP cannot be allowed to win this one.
