evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) (08/08/89)
In article <3954@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes: >I have made my >living from selling information for over a decade. So have most of us in the computer biz who are past 30. You want a medal? >To clear your mind on the latter, I don't sell CP -- they want too much >money for the smaller market that I can sell it to. Of course, by your >theory, I should go get it and sell it anyway, without paying, because >"everybody does it." If that's what you got from my post, God bless. I invite others to read the original post and draw their own inferences. >Indeed, newspapers do scalp stories from other papers -- rewriting them. >Any paper that took a wire item verbatim without paying for it would >hear pretty quickly from the wireservice. Speak from facts or firsthand knowledge, please. At the time I was at the Toronto Sun, and had my first genuine 'scoop', the Sun had just bought UPI's Canadian arm, called it UPC, and had withdrawn from CP. Still, within an hour of the Sun's release, an article came over the CP wire with major pieces taken verbatim from my story. Surprised that this kind of thing could happen, I asked the city editor, and later the managing editor about the practice. The truth about hard news is that nobody in the industry gives a damn, once one organization or the other gets the story first. The only thing the media cares to protect in copyright, it sells in syndication (comics, columns, etc). Opinion pieces are usually guarded a bit, but there's very little copyright enforcement on hard news. Besides, the daily news media thrives on timeliness, and old news has little monetary value to protect. The value of news archival products like InfoGlobe and Informart lies more with their abilities to manage such huge amount of information, rather than the collective value of individual old news stories. >Posting a clipping from a >newspaper on the wall of a restaurant isn't against the will of the >paper, as far as I know, either. Technically, it is most definitely 'against the will', as long as newspapers have departments which attempt to make money off 'official' reprints. Most of them do, but again, they generally don't care. >But the audacity to defend [posting a wire story verbatim] as an OK thing >bothers me far more. If you were to re-sell information off a newswire without paying royalties you might hear from lawyers. Redistribute an article for free, days after first publication, to advance the cause of a political action group, and you won't even get their attention. Brad, you may consider it worthwhile to be bothered about such things, when even the wire services themselves aren't bothered. That you choose to do so publicly was the point of my original posting. -- Evan Leibovitch, SA, Telly Online, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / Director & editor, /usr/group/cdn 3 most stressful jobs in Canada: Policeman, fireman, choirboy in Newfoundland
brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) (08/09/89)
In article <618540279.4999@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes: >Speak from facts or firsthand knowledge, please. The wireservice market is transforming into the electronic publishing market. They're starting to take a different stance from what they took when the Sun bought UPI. Wireservice companies are starting to make a bigger and bigger chunk of their revenue from electronic sales. Consider Reuters, the biggest. You wanna take a guess as to how much of their revenue comes from sales to media clients such as newspapers? Compared to direct feeds of information (mostly financial) into company computer systems? If your guess had 2 digits in it, it's wrong. It's 6%. >Brad, you may consider it worthwhile to be bothered about such things, >when even the wire services themselves aren't bothered. That you choose >to do so publicly was the point of my original posting. The wireservice people I talk to today are bothered. Oh, it's not as much of an issue or problem as software piracy, but they know that it soon will be. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473