[LINK] Clinging to a dead biz model for dear life

[Kim Holburn]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/17/732381/-Clinging-to-a-dead-biz-model-for-dear-life

Funny but rather hard hitting article.

> For two lawyers who supposedly specialize in media and First  
> Amendment law, these guys were so full of stupid I'm embarrassed for  
> them. You see, they have just the legislative solutions to the  
> newspaper industry's ills!
>
>     -- Bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine.  
> Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the  
> "fair use" doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports,  
> academics and the arts -- republishing a quote to comment on it, for  
> example -- is not what search engines practice when they crawl the  
> Web and ingest everything in their path.
>
> Yeah, Google driving traffic to the newspapers' sites are the reason  
> newspapers are in trouble. This line of argumentation is not only  
> idiotic beyond words, but newspapers have a simple solution: block  
> Google from crawling their sites with a "nofollow" "disallow" tag in  
> their robots.txt file. Now if that sounds complicated to you, it's  
> not: it's literally one single word in an HTML page that tells  
> Google "stay the fuck out because we're too fucking stupid to want  
> people to find our material via search engines!"
>
> Here's the problem, 1) the newspapers don't want Google to stay the  
> fuck out, and 2) newspaper execs are actually not so fucking stupid  
> that they want their sites blind to potential readers. The issue is,  
> they want Google to PAY them for the privilege of sending people  
> their direction. Why? Who knows! Maybe because they're fucking stupid?

......

This para caught my eye:

> Of course, it's pretty much corporate consolidation that has killed  
> the newspaper biz, with big media conglomerates squeezing newspapers  
> dry in the quest for 30 percent profit margins. It's no accident  
> that the most stable newspapers left are generally the family owned  
> ones. So the solution these guys are proposing is in fact more of  
> the same that has gotten newspapers into this kind of trouble. So  
> that could be considered stupid. But aside from that, if they want  
> to double down on this failure, all the power to them. I'd give them  
> this one.

I wonder how true that is?


-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3494957443
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request