Google has renewed its news content licensing deal with the AP this week, following months of negotiations.
The deal will allow Google to post full-text articles from the AP on Google News.
“We look forward to future collaborations, including on ways Google and AP can work together to create a better user experience and new revenue opportunities,” says Josh Cohen, a Google senior business product manager.
Says the AP: “Under the agreement, AP and Google will also work together in a number of new areas, such as ways to improve discovery and distribution of news.”
There was no word on the financials of the deal.
In January, after a negotiation dispute, Google stopped publishing AP stories. They began running them again in February.
Result for: content
According to RIAA President Cary Sherman, the DMCA doesn’t work for the content industry because it doesn’t make service providers responsible for policing copyright infringement.
In statements made as part of a panel discussion at an event hosted by the Technology Policy Institute, Sherman said, “the DMCA isn’t working for content people at all.”
He went on to explain, “You basically cannot monitor all the infringements on the internet,” later adding, “everybody has to do something about piracy.”
This line of reasoning is nothing new for the RIAA, but it remains as flawed as ever. It requires that you accept a number of assumptions which simply don’t hold up to any real scrutiny.
The most obvious is that there’s any way to stop piracy. It’s easy to say somebody has to do it, but there’s no evidence anyone actually can.
According to the Sherman the solution is for everyone from ISPs on up to do get involved. But this creates some significant legal problems.
How does an ISP monitor the content of on their network without violating federal wiretapping law?
And that’s without considering that figuring out whether fair use is involved requires human intervention, which would automatically disqualify the provider from DMCA safe harbor protection.
So if ISPs can’t find infringement what about services like RapidShare? Sure they could use a filtering system like YouTube has implemented, but what’s to stop people from switching to a new service with no such arrangement in place?
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Result for: content
It looks like Hulu, the streaming video service owned by NBC Universal, News Corp & Disney is preparing to become a publicly traded company. The New York Times is reporting unnamed sources indicated an IPO (Initial Public Offering) could happen as early as this fall.
Assuming they can convince potential investors their new subscription service, Hulu Plus, can be profitable, there’s still another hurdle to overcome. Hulu’s management, led by ex-Amazon.com executive Jason Kilar, have been proponents of getting Hulu playing on every screen possible. But some of Kilar’s better decisions have been undermined by Hulu’s owners.
It’s quite possible the insider information given to Times reporters was intended to see how potential investors respond. An IPO may wait if their reaction isn’t positive.
But assuming they do go public eventually, Kilar and his team will need less oversight from Hulu’s content providers. Those providers have been resistant to the idea of Hulu’s free (ad supported) content making its way to TV screens through devices like media center PCs and game consoles.
Looking at it strictly from Hulu’s point of view, this seems like a big barrier to attracting subscribers for Hulu Plus. The problem is Hulu’s content owners are trying to solve the wrong problem.
The question isn’t whether some type of free internet distribution will compete with traditional television services. The competition, both licensed and unauthorized, is already there and the market isn’t going away just because they don’t cater to it.
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