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rights trade
This page looks at online syndication services and markets
for selling articles, papers or books to publishers. It
also looks at anonymous publication schemes.
It covers -
rights management
A separate guide deals with
Intellectual Property - Australian and overseas developments
regarding copyright, patents and trademarks in the digital
environment.
Information about trade in copyright collections (eg film
and music catalogues) is provided here.
syndication
There is a dawning realisation that consumers visit
sites to conduct transactions or to access content, not
for the joy of admiring someone's code. Along with navigation,
"content is king".
But content does not fall from the skies like a nicely
roasted duck, silver knife and fork attached. Given the
difficulty sites experience in generating their own content
- it is challenging, it is expensive - many are replicating
traditional publishing models by buying syndicated content.
Five experiments of interest are:
Byline,
"the world's first Internet syndication service",
offering instant global access - within a sophisticated
electronic rights management and licensing system -
to a growing bank of journalism. Journalists and other
rights holders can post articles electronically, for
global or more restricted licensing. Editors, publishers
and other potential customers are able to search the
site for print syndication and use of material in online/offline
electronic forms.
Screaming
Media - the name is some indication that the company
was founded by the former head of one of the zanier
major advertising agencies - offers content in which
to embed your online advertisements. For those interested
in developments with online advertising we supply a
few pointers (more will appear in future) in our Marketing
guide to industry and academic studies.
Rightscenter.com
- developed by maverick and master of self-promotion
John Brockman,
Rightscenter is advertised as "the publishing network
of the next century", with publishers, authors,
agents and others able to identify and trade books over
an extranet. Our assessment is that so far most players
prefer to use the networks of the current century, particularly
if they can 'do lunch' in the process. As of mid 2000
Rightscenter.com had around 1,000 titles.
iSyndicate.com
- styled as "the content marketplace", iSyndicate
distributes graphics, text, audio and video content
from 880 sources to a claimed 223,000 sites.
In
contrast, Knexa
seeks to dispense with the intermediary. Like several
US and EU schemes it is a "new online marketplace
for buying and selling digital articles and books".
Authors set prices on their work: would-be readers either
pay the price or make auction-like bids. Users can browse
the items for sale or ask a question and wait for an author
to propose a priced answer. Users can rate the authors
and are encouraged to base their purchases in part on
these ratings. Knexa takes a 20% commission on each sale.
For
images one perspective is offered by Exploiting Images
& Image Collections in the New Media: Goldmine or
Legal Minefield? (London: Kluwer 1999), an uneven
but valuable collection of essays edited by Barbara Hoffman.
The answer to the question is of course that it's both
a goldmine - Hoffman suggests that the market is worth
upwards of US$1 billion with a 15% annual growth rate
- and a minefield.
Anonymous Publication schemes
Data havens and systems for anonymizing publication
of text have gained some attention in academic and cyberlibertarian
circles as a means of subverting censorship or copyright.
Ian Clarke, for example, sniffs that
Copyright
law attempts to prevent communication in some circumstances.
And therefore, in order for Freenet to do its job successfully,
it must prevent enforcement of copyright law
through
an anonymous Peer to
Peer scheme such as Gnutella (discussed in our Intellectual
Property guide). That's reminiscent
of Jaron Lanier's alarmist article
in defense of Napster, asserting that copyright is "a
massive government-sponsored protection racket" and
"if we make Napster-like free file
sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either
computers or democracy".
Projects include -
Anderson's
Eternity Service
Charles
University Eternity Service
FreeHaven,
an academic project at MIT
Clarke's Freenet
and its Espra
offshoot
Gnutella
the
Intermemory Project
Mojo
Nation
OceanStore
Publius
TAZ and Rewebber
Usenet
Eternity
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