Should Retractions be Behind a Paywall?

"UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim", so proclaimed an article in The Times earlier this year. It began [.pdf]:

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

Well, not so unsubstantiated, it turns out: The Times has just issued a pretty complete retraction - you can read the whole thing here. But what interests me in this particular case is not the science, but the journalistic aspect.

Because if you went to The Times site to read that retraction, you would, of course, be met by the stony stare of the latter's paywall (assuming you haven't subscribed). Which means that I - and I imagine many people who read the first, inaccurate Times story - can't read the retraction there. Had it not been for the fact that among the many climate change sites (on both sides) that I read, there was this one with a copy, I might never have known.

So here's the thing: if a story has appeared on the open Web, and needs to be retracted, do newspapers like The Times have a duty to post that retraction in the open, or is acceptable to leave behind the paywall?

Answers on the back of yesterday's newspaper...

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What Mr. Lammy *Still* Does Not Get

Surpising - but good - news if true:

Internet service providers will not be forced to disconnect users who repeatedly flout the law by illegally sharing music and video files, The Times has learnt.

Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, said last year that the Government had “serious legislative intent” to compel internet companies to cut off customers who ignore warnings not to pirate material.

However, in an interview with The Times, David Lammy, the Intellectual Property Minister, said that the Government had ruled out legislating to force ISPs to disconnect such users.

The reasoning is notable:

Speaking ahead of the publication of a report on the future of Britain's digital industries, Mr Lammy said that there were very complex legal issues wrapped up in enforced disconnection. He added: “I'm not sure it's actually going to be possible.”

Spot on. I hope this also means that the UK will be voting against any attempts to bring this in at a European level.

Given this understanding, I was disappointed with the following from Mr Lammy:

Mr Lammy, who has begun a big consultation entitled Developing a Copyright Agenda for the 21st Century, said that there was a big difference between organised counterfeiting gangs and “younger people not quite buying into the system”. He said: “We can't have a system where we're talking about arresting teenagers in their bedrooms. People can rent a room in an hotel and leave with a bar of soap - there's a big difference between leaving with a bar of soap and leaving with the television.”

I quite agree about the difference (and support legal action against criminal counterfeiting gangs), but it's got nothing to do with bars of soap. This metaphor perpetuates the erroneous idea that infringing on copyright is simply stealing - albeit stealing bars of soap. It is not only legally totally different, it is conceptually totally different in the case of digital files, as in the present situation.

If I steal a bar of soap from a hotel (heaven forfend), the hotel no longer has the soap; it incurs a real loss from something being taken away. If I make a digital copy of a file, nobody loses that file; nothing has been "taken".

The correct - and important - question is whether the copyright holder loses at at any point. That comes down to the simple arithmetic of whether people making unauthorised copies of music increase or decrease the number of copies that are later sold.

The evidence seems to be the former - the idea being that unauthorised copies function as marketing for the "real" thing. This means that the music industry should actually encourage such copies, since ultimately they will reap the benefits - just as the Monty Python crew have done:

when Monty Python launched their channel in November, not only did their YouTube videos shoot to the top of the most viewed lists, but their DVDs also quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon's Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 per cent.

As has been said before, the greatest loss to artists comes not from unauthorised copying, but from not reaching as much of your potential audience as possible, as easily as possible.

It's great to see Mr Lammy taking a reasonable line here, but it would be even better if he understood the profound difference between analogue and digital, and between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods, that lies at the heart of this whole discussion.

Spot the Disconnect

On the one hand, we have a bunch of people I've never heard of whingeing in the Times:

We are very concerned that the successes of the creative industries in the UK are being undermined by the illegal online file-sharing of film and TV content. At a time when so many jobs are being lost in the wider economy, it is especially important that this issue be taken seriously by the Government and that it devotes the resources necessary to enforce the law.

In 2007, an estimated 98 million illegal downloads and streams of films took place in the UK, while it is believed that more than six million people illegally file-share regularly. In relation to illegal downloads of TV programmes, the UK is the world leader, with up to 25 per cent of all online TV piracy taking place in the UK. Popular shows are downloaded illegally hundreds of thousands of times per episode.

On the other, we have this perceptive comment from TorrentFreak:

when just this year it was reported that UK commercial TV broadcasters “enjoyed a bumper April with the highest viewing figures in five years”, that total TV viewing was up 10% year-on-year, and “the valuable yet hard-to-reach 16 to 24-year-old demographic [i.e the typical file-sharer] watched 4.9% more commercial TV in April year-on-year and saw 12% more ads,” you have to wonder exactly what the problem is.

So how do we reconcile those? Well, could it be, dear Times whingers, that the Internet actually *drives* traffic to your precious films and TV programmes, whatever they are? Could it be that the Internet is actually going to keep you all employed and so fraffly well-paid?

Is the Great God Google Too Good?

A few weeks back I wrote about how that nice Mr. Google was sending me around 50% of my traffic to these 'umble pages. I have a confession to make: I was wrong, it's not 50%. It's more like 60%, going on 70% some days. In fact, if the graph of visitors sent to me by Google continues to climb at its current rate, I shall probably soon have the entire planet visiting every day.

And it seems I'm not the only one impressed by Google's ability to deliver what we used to called "eyeballs" in those good old Web 1.0 days. Here's what The Daily Telegraph's "digital editor" (impressive, I'm still analogue myself) says:

“The most important driver of all readers [to our site] is Google, except for people who know us and come directly. It plays a critical part of exporting our brand, particularly to the U.S.”

At least I don't seem to have sunk quite so low as The Times, which

“is training journalists to write in a way that makes their articles more likely to appear among Google’s unpaid search results.”

Maybe Google is becoming a little too efficient at this game - to the extent that it's warping the world it's supposed to be serving.