Rupert Murdoch Admits Defeat: Now Wants London Times To Appear In Search Results

Remember back in 2009, when Techdirt reported that Rupert Murdoch hated Google so much he had decided to block the search engine from indexing his titles, even though this would inevitably cut down their visibility and online traffic? He obviously thought that he would put this upstart technology in its place, showing that mighty media moguls don't need this Internet thing in order to flourish just like they did 50 years ago. According to this story in paidContent, it seems that strategy hasn't worked out too well: 

On Techdirt.

UK Newspapers Confirm Digital Death-Wish

I thought I had plumbed the depths of the UK newspaper industry's stupidity when it came to digital. The idea that putting up paywalls in any way strengthens the readership, reputation and brand of a publication was so far off the mark that I thought it was not possible to go beyond it in sheer wrong-headedness.

I was wrong:

The UK government is abandoning plans that would have compelled publishers of content behind “paywalls” to make that content available for free through Britain’s main libraries.

...

“The government is committed to delivering regulations that cover non-print content and therefore propose to develop the draft regulations to include only off-line content, and on-line content that can be obtained through a harvesting process.”

The fact that the government was bamboozled into believing that it was impossible to "harvest" online content behind paywalls shows how little it understands about technology: it would be trivial to allow external access through a VPN to the editing/versioning systems that newspaper journalists, subs and editors have access to internally. It would probably cost nothing - as in zero. The idea that it would require "£100K per annum per publisher" as some were suggesting, is absurd.

It's also disappointing to see the Guardian Media Group making idiotic statements like this:

“A random patch work of snap shots will “plug the digital black hole” which the British Library (BL) states threatens the nation’s digital heritage ... it poses a real threat to our ability to safeguard our commercial interests. The threat arises from the BL itself.

If they really think "snapshots" are enough, they, too, have not understand the deep changes being wrought by the shift to digital, despite their relative success there compared to other even more benighted publishers. The whole point is that for the first time in history, we have the possibility of capturing everything, and finding unguessed-at connections between them at a later date. This is unique, invaluable data about not just newspapers but the world they purport to mirror that cannot ever be obtained from "snapshots."

This comment also confirms once more that copyright is a canker, eating away even at the heart of one of the few "serious" newspapers with a vaguely liberal attitude to re-use. The fact that the Guardian Media Group thinks that its "commercial interests" somehow outweigh the rights of posterity is a terrible comment on the state of media thinking in this country.

Bear in mind, that this is stuff that theoretically is supposed to enter the public domain after some (long) but finite period: so does that mean all the newspapers will be progressively releasing their files down the years? I think not - it will doubtless be "too expensive" again, and that presupposes that the newspapers are even still around, which I strongly doubt based on their current reading of and response to trends.

And this is the real tragedy. By refusing to allow Legal Deposit Libraries to do their job - to capture culture as it is made, and store it safely for the future - they are inevitably consigning themselves and their production to oblivion at some point, when they close their doors, or the servers crash and the backup copies can't be found or don't work. They are throwing away not just our past, but theirs too.

Update: seems the UK government hasn't swallowed the UK publishing industry's ridiculous claims. Let's hope it perseveres here.

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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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British Library's Bitter Digital Milestone

Oh look, the British Library thinks it has passed a milestone:

The British Library has added the 500,000th item to its long-term Digital Library System. The milestone item was a digitised copy of a newspaper originally published in 1864 and scanned as part of the Library's 19th Century British Library Newspapers project, which recently made more than 2 million pages of historic newspapers available online at http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/

In eight pages of densely-packed text, The Birmingham Daily Post dated Monday 19 December 1864 offers a vivid snapshot of life 145 years ago. Along with accounts of an 82-year-old man who died after falling out of bed and two men before the courts for bigamy, the paper also reports on President Lincoln recommending to the US congress the passing of a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, and 'a number of the worst "roughs" of the town' who pelted churchgoers with snowballs after several inches of snow had fallen.

The digitised newspaper joins hundreds of thousands of other items including e-journals, digital sound recordings, born-digital material received through voluntary deposit arrangements with publishers andmore than 65,000 19th century digitised books. The Digital Library System within which these items are now stored has been developed by the British Library to enable long term storage of the digital material that forms an increasing proportion of the nation's intellectual output.

Fab stuff...except:

To access the subscription-based articles in this database, you will need to first register as a user and then purchase either

* A 24-hour pass that provides you access to 100 articles over that period.
* A 7-day pass that provides you access to 200 articles over that period.

Cost?

a 24-hour pass for £6.99 allowing you to view up to 100 articles, or a seven-day pass with 200 article views for £9.99

That is: digitising content that is out of copyright, in the public domain, and then making us pay through the nose - us as in muggins public, which has kept the British Library going for two centuries thanks to our taxes, in case you'd forgotten - for the privilege of viewing it online.

Thanks a bunch, BL, for locking up "an increasing proportion of the nation's intellectual output" behind a paywall, where few will ever see it: that's what spreading knowledge is all about, isn't it? Great work from a quondam great institution, more millstone than milestone...

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The Egregious Economist

I continue to be gobsmacked by the egregious stupidity of The Economist:

Commercial piracy may not be as horrific as the seaborne version off the Horn of Africa.... But stealing other people’s R&D, artistic endeavour or even journalism is still theft.

Not only is it not as horrific as what occurs off the Horn of Africa, it is a total insult to parrot such a stupid, loaded metaphor, which consciously tries to equate the two. And for the six billionth time, it's *not* theft, no matter how many times you repeat it: it's infringement.

Nothing is stolen: you still have your R&D, your artistic endeavour or even your journalism. What has happened is that others may be making use of those, possibly against some laws in certain jurisdictions. Quite how terrible that might be depends on many factors, not least the scale and intent.

Maybe it would be better if The Economist put the paywall back to protect innocent minds from its idiocies.

New York Times Sees the Light and Opens Up

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

...

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

A nice vindication for the "make money by giving it away" approach, and testimony to the power of the Web 2.0 world, driven as it by search engines and user-generated content. (Via Boing Boing.)