Kos's front-pager over here on the copyright lawers at Baker + Hostetler trying to put the genie and the toothpaste and the spilled milk back into the bottle is an even deeper issue than he posits, and really touches the essence of where we will get our news from, MSM and otherwise, starting, like, this year.
Firstly, I'm not worried about this case impacting Google's appropriate freedom and opt-out. This firm used to represent me. Their top client was - in all seriousness - Alf.
They were there to protect their client from fake Alf memorabilia.
But secondly, the goal here is not, as Kos notes, to save newspapers and other news organizations from having to choose between being or not being Googlable, but to prevent them from making that choice, to make sure nobody can be Googled. It's a business model born of desperation, in essence a form of price-fixing, but on the grand scale ('you can't sell that for a dollar! We sell it for $399.95!').
Thirdly, and I'm not saying this or anything like this is a good idea, but in July I will observe my 30th anniversary in tv and radio (and a lot of print on the side) and not since little Cap Cities Broadcasting bought big ABC, have I been as stunned as I was three weeks ago when the NewsCorp quarterly figures came out.
Total Operating Income for the first quarter, down 47 percent. Total Operating Income for NewsCorp newspapers, down 97 percent. Total Operating income for NewsCorp non-cable TV, down 99 percent. This meant that even with The Wall Street Journal (which despite letting the editorial sleaze ooze into content, still makes money, and has a vague idea of making money on line), and "American Idol" (the franchise in tv), etc., only cable makes money for Rupert. This array of numbers is similar to NBC, and ABC (ESPN), and would be for CBS if they had any cable of note.
What all that did was change, in my mind, the date by which the following will happen: a Top 10 city newspaper (like, but not necessarily, The Boston Globe) will go out of business, and a Top 20 city owned + operated television station will eliminate its newscasts. I used to think that would happen by 2020. I have revised this to the end of this year. I was more than surprised to find out yesterday that the CBS station in Chicago just got rid of its weekend morning news, and Fox is thinking of getting rid of all its weekend news at its secondary station in New York.
Some of this stuff is very funny from a political point of view, but hardly so from the POV of news consumers. I'll be the first to agree the MSM has moved to redesign itself with the alacrity of Captain Smith of Titanic. It's just that the narrowing of any industry does not usually result in Fewer/Better, not quickly anyway. In the short term it means More/Worse as even the still-profitable ones cut back and use wire services and prepackaged stuff.
There is also the prospect of Vanity Press outfits outlasting real news organizations. What would happen if the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette went out of business? Suddenly Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review, which has the circulation of a mildly interesting rumor, could be the only game in town. What if Murdoch's response in New York is not to shut down WWOR's weekend news but to Fox-News-Ize it?
I'm not advocating for this copyright argument and I believe Baker + Hostetler needs to stick to defending Alf. It's just that this is, believe it or not, a kind of golden age of American information: the net is finally getting many MSM outlets off their asses in terms of investigation and viewpoint, and the MSM is still the primary jumping-off point for virtually every piece of news on the net. I don't know what happens when one part of this equation vanishes, and we're headed that way (unless Google wants to buy the Associated Press).
