I noticed this morning in an email from Blendle Daily
Digest that when it sends links to various interesting news stories, it now
charges a microamount (usually less than $0.50) to read the story. Forbes has an article on the company (Parul Guliani, March 2016).
Obviously, the news aggregation company has set up
license agreements with the various publishers to do so. The company would have
to operate email subscription lists and find people willing to stay on the list
(in a world where people want to eliminate mass emails as potential “spam” – I often
disagreed with “Blogtyrant’ on this point in the past). One question would be,
is this an effective way to “consolidate” or “bundle” paywalls?
I suppose for a consumer willing to get “their” daily
news from one filter that’s possible. I don’t like that because then I am
dependent on any political bias of the provider (although I don’t really see
evidence of any in the email from this company -- which apparently has to handpick the articles).
Another problem is that blogs (like mine) often offer
links to articles. When a visitor goes
to such a link, the visitor may find a paywall.
The publication may allow a few free articles a month, but some do not –
partly because they can be spread among devices and different IP addresses. In my operation and view, my visitor is
responsible for their own paywall arrangements – and I’d like this to be easier
than it is. I have digital subscriptions
to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times,
and a few periodicals. I generally will get the print subscription if I subscribe
at all, but in a couple of cases the subscriptions have not connected to the
digital part easily. It is all rather clumsy.
I’d rather have bulk subscription bundles like magazines used to have in the past.
There is at least one publisher, Fox News, that has
thrown HTTP-403-forbiddens when I try to link to their main site from Blogger
(can do indirectly through Twitter).
Generally broadcast network site articles are free to
browse and don’t have paywalls (which may related to the idea that Fox doesn’t
want amateur sites linking to it?)
Then you have the idea that the EU, for European members,
wants publishers to collect a link tax – although according to a Google article
that applies only to quotes now.
But clearly some media companies are sensitive to the
idea that not only search engines but individual commentators or “citizen journalists”
aggregate the news with links to provide their own perspective, often for free
(or with ads). I don’t know how this plays out when a YouTube channel presents
the article text and scrolls through it in a video to comment on the story. Some local news stations will have disclaimers
like “this news story may not be rewritten or redistributed” on their sites.
Well, since 2000, as I recall, the courts have
defended mere hyperlinks as fair use, as essentially the same as term paper
footnotes. But Electronic Frontier Foundation as recently as 2018 had to write
an amicus letter noting that in a hyperlink suit against BoingBoing. And there is still a case in New York State
regarding embeds, which are a kind of hyperlink (Goldman and Breitbart, see
Feb. 17, 2018 here).
The video above discusses the problem in the EU (as of 2017, before the link tax became controversial with the EU Copyright Directive).
What’s more at issue seems to be a kind of herd health
for the whole publishing world.
Companies like Blendle could feel that bloggers who offer links and
footnotes for free are undermining things, when these companies need to make money
to employ people – there is a degree of familiar protectionism in this
argument. In time, social media platforms or even hosting companies may not
want their customers to do this because it is seen as bad for other people’s
jobs – this sounds like could become a “philosophical” rather than legal threat
in the future in the next couple of years.
We’ve lost a lot of ground on free speech and citizen journalism in the
past few years as the world is becoming more populist and collectivist on both
sides.
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