Michael Boyle's weblog
waxy.org that it looks like Suck.com is gone and may be gone forever. That would be a real shame because, as I have said before, a lot of what’s great about the web can be traced directly back to Suck.com.
Update: It looks like the site is back now – must have been some sort of glitch.
Can Papers End the Free Ride Online? I had an experience with something like this a few weeks ago visiting my parents. Someone suggested that the Canadian papers were smart to charge for access, as they mostly do now. We discussed this for a little bit, but didn’t take the discussion very far.
The next day we were looking for info on something in the news. “To Google,” I said, “we’ll find the answer there for sure.” And we typed in a couple words and got our answer. Of course there were no results from barricaded news sites – and the value of open archives was made clear.
Newspapers have been losing readership for years, and no one has ever proven a correlation between declining readership and open archives. If I were a shareholder in a media company, I would demand that the company demonstrate the correlation and if it were not proven, ask that the company fulfill its public service mandate to contribute to the civic life of the city, province, and country.
for newspaper websites from Jay Rosen: Will the Greensboro Newspaper Open Its Archive? There is an issue, though, with the analysis. One of the first points made is that open archives are beneficial to newspapers in that they would support a newspaper in becoming an authority, a journal of record. While I believe this is true, I question whether this is a goal for most newspapers.
For the New York Times and the Washington Post perhaps it is – but for the vast majority of the rest of the media firmament, I doubt that their publishers care about this even a little bit. The newspaper business today seems to be about nothing more than protecting local advertising markets.
The sense that a newspaper participates in the democratic exchange of news and opinions about the events of the day seems to be a legacy goal that still plays in the abstract but has little to do with the actual interests of publishers. In that context, the call for open archives seems quite beside the point.
one of my fave issues surrounding copyright on the net is going to be heard by the Supreme Court in the US: High Court Takes Freelance Case. It goes like this: as a freelance writer, when I sell an article, I am only selling a license of first publication of my work. Back in the day, however, many or most companies were turning around and using material covered by such contracts in other ways without further compensation. The companies’ position is that, ” a lower court ruling in the authors’ favor ‘sets a national rule requiring the destruction of decades’ worth of articles’ stored in electronic archives. “
That’s not really true, though. They are free to use such articles – if they want the right to subsequent publication, they should just pay the copyright holder for such a licence and not a first-publication license – pretty simple. The point is more or less moot now, as most freelance contracts have been amended to cover later electronic usage – at no extra fee to the copyright holder. A freelance writer has very little power in that relationship – it’s a buyer’s market.
from Matthew Fuller, one of the i/o/d guys: WARNING… This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder; Eating Disorder: The Story of a Shape (from CTHEORY); Neurocity (from frAme); People would go crazy (from Nettime‘s archives); etc.
