The local daily fishwrap has decided to put its stories behind a paywall. I can now cough up $150+ a year for coverage of the city council’s decision on whether or not to buy a downtown parking lot to reroute a street that’s been taken over by the state, local car crashes, domestic violence arrests and burglaries, the neighboring town’s budget squabbles, plus a whole pile of cut-and-paste from AP and other national wires.
Or not. That’s more than I would pay for a personal subscription to various learned journals, to the WSJ, even to the unlamented New York Times Select. So what the hell? On an average weekday, I click on maybe three or four stories. Are they worth 25 cents each to me, day in, day out?
From the newspaper’s point of view I can see it — pretty clearly no one except the crazy commenters is reading the web version, so it’s not supported by ad revenue. (I have no idea how few people are reading the print version, but it’s not a big town in the first place.) So they might as well price high and milk the diehards they have.
And for me: other than going down to city council meetings hanging around city hall, dropping by the police department every day, there is No. Effing. Other. Way. I can find out what’s going on in my town. So I pretty much get to pay a huge premium over the going rate for text I want to read, or choose to be uninformed. I’m not even sure if there is anywhere you can just walk in and but a copy.
Copyright is dead
May 4, 2012At least if you’re a big company and you want to violate it.
How OpenStreetMap Got Apple To Give It Due Credit | TPM Idea Lab
Completely ignored in all of this back-and-forth has been the fact that the CC attribution license is a license for things that are copyrighted, and that if you make copies without following it, you are infringing. Depending on the way Apple has parceled up the data when developing iphoto and the mood of a court, that would be statutory damages anywhere from the low millions to the high tens of billions.
Oh, and distribution of copyrighted material worth more than $2000? Check. For personal gain? Check. In interstate commerce? Check. Apple management and the engineers involved in the project have pretty clearly met the predicates for the criminal law involving piracy for profit.
But none of that matters these days unless you’re some dweeb downloading songs or your favorite movie.
Posted in Borked Comment Systems, dystopias, tech policy | Leave a Comment »