The New York Times paywall is officially coming down:
The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
Or as I put it last year:
The columnists of the New York Times got a lot more attention from the blogosphere before they went behind the Times Select paywall. In the long run, the Times will have to either tear down their paywall, or their columnists will fade into obscurity. Why should people pay to read the Times’s anointed pundits when there are as good (or at least nearly as good) pundits whose work is available for free?
I think it’s only a matter of time before the Journal crunches the numbers and reaches the same conclusion.
What is the best way to promote the creation and adoption of new software and communications technologies? That was the weighty second panel of ACT‘s day-long innovation session at the Economic Forum 2007 in Krynica, Poland.
All panelists agreed that the future of software innovation is a mixed one – a combination of both open and proprietary licensing. According to, the panel’s moderator, ACT’s Chairman Mike Sax, we see mixed use today and we’ll see it tomorrow.
Petri Peltonen, (Director General, Technology Department, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Finland) emphasized that innovation performance is crucially dependent on strengthening investment in and the use of new technologies by both the public and private sectors. Information and Communication Technologies provide the backbone for the knowledge economy and account for around half of the productivity growth in modern economies.
As one the open source community’s chief advocates, Larry Rosen was on his game. He called the development of open source software the result of community-driven meritocracy. And in response to a question, he professed that he didn’t see problems with legislation that would mandate procurement preferences.
Should there be a limited or expansive role for government regulation and subsidies of ICT? Government shouldn’t be prescribing fixed mandates in such a dynamic industry, said Piotr Stryszowski, an economist at the OECD (who emphasized he was speaking on his and not his employer’s behalf). Piotr is helping conduct an important OECD study on the drivers for software innovation.
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I suppose it should warm my heart when interest groups deploy libertarian rhetoric. At the very least it’s a sign that libertarian themes resonate with policymakers, which is a hopeful sign. But despite their best efforts to sell the issue in libertarian terms, I didn’t find this very persuasive:
Recent initiatives have been floated that would expropriate from nonprofit and commercial journals results of their work in conducting peer review of authors submissions — if the authors’ research was funded by the government. The government would then post these articles for free use on the Internet and in direct competition with the journals from which the articles are taken. The expropriation of the journals’ contribution is being proposed in spite of the fact it is the publisher and not the government who conducts the peer review.
This issue seems very simple to me: if I’m going to be forced as a taxpayer to fund a given scientist’s research, I shouldn’t have to pay a second time to see the results of that research. The effect of such a policy on the publishing industry is really beside the point. Nobody is forcing scientific journals to accept papers based on government-funded research. If they accept only privately-funded research, then they can set any policies they like regarding public access. But if a journal is going to publish research funded with my tax dollars, I shouldn’t have to pay a second time to read the results.
Things get even more specious here (PDF), where John Conyers charges that mandating public disclosure of research results “would send a mixed message to our trading partners about the importance of intellectual property rights.” The “intellectual property rights” in question belong to the researchers, at least until they sign contracts assigning rights to the publishers. Researchers are entitled to assign or not assign those “intellectual property rights” to whomever they want, and it strikes me as perfectly reasonable and appropriate for the government to make it a condition of receiving federal funding that the researchers not sign any contracts giving exclusive rights to another private party.
Clay Shirky is one of my favorite commentators about the economic and social changes that the Internet is bringing to the media world. Last year I linked to his fantastic essays on the folly of micropayments. Last month, Shirky wrote this excellent post about what’s wrong with the Nick Carr brand of Internet old-fogeyism:
Prior to unlimited perfect copyability, media was defined by profound physical and economic constraints, and now it’s not. Fewer constraints and better matching of supply and demand are good for business, because business is not concerned with historical continuity. Fewer constraints and better matching of supply and demand are bad for current culture, because culture continually mistakes current exigencies for eternal verities.
This isn’t just Carr of course. As people come to realize that freedom destroys old forms just as surely as it creates new ones, the lament for the long-lost present is going up everywhere. As another example, Sven Birkerts, the literary critic, has a post in the Boston Globe, Lost in the blogosphere, that is almost indescribably self-involved. His two complaints are that newspapers are reducing the space allotted to literary criticism, and too many people on the Web are writing about books. In other words, literary criticism, as practiced during Birkerts’ lifetime, was just right, and having either fewer or more writers are both lamentable situations.
In order that the “Life was better when I was younger” flavor of his complaint not become too obvious, Birkerts frames the changing landscape not as a personal annoyance but as A Threat To Culture Itself. As he puts it “…what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.”
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Mark Blafkin objects to my post on the First Sale Doctrine:
Tim is also glossing over the most important point. Free software depends on “license agreements” as much if not more than Ballmer and Co. By my reading, if the courts were to fully subscribe to the ideas of Fred VL and Tim, the entire Copy Left movement would be crippled. They would not be able to impose any of the limitations on use/redistribution that are contained in the various versions of the GPL. The proprietary software industry can probably survive without shrinkwrap licensing as Tim suggests, but I don’t see how the Open Source/Free Software communities can survive under the legal framework that Tim is espousing.
Three points come to mind here. First, the most obvious point is that (as Mark would doubtless agree) we shouldn’t necessarily be interpreting copyright law in a way that privileges free software or any other particular business model. If the overall best interpretation of copyright law means the GPL, as written, can’t be enforced, that’s a problem for Eben Moglen, not for the copyright system. I like free software but I don’t like it that much.
Secondly, a point I gleaned from Fred in last week’s podcast: the first sale doctrine is focused on the distribution right. The GPL, in contrast, primarily implicates the reproduction and derivative work rights. There is not, as far as I know, a First Sale Doctrine with respect to those other rights. That is, if I sell someone the right to reproduce my copyrighted work, there’s no copyright provision that says that person can turn around and sell the right to a third party.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the courts have never been the primary enforcement mechanism for the GPL, which is a social contract as much as it is a legal one. The GPL lays out the preconditions for being a member in good standing of the free software community. The primary penalty for violating the license isn’t that you get sued; it’s that you get ostracized by free software developers. As Novell has discovered, you can be in technical compliance with the letter of the GPL and still get ostracized for violating its spirit. So while it’s obviously better for the free software community if they have the force of law backing them up, the GPL might continue to be useful even if it becomes difficult to enforce in a court of law.
I’m heading to Poland this weekend to speak at the Krynica Economic Forum, the most prominent public policy conference for Central and Eastern Europe. My organization, ACT, is sponsoring a daylong session on public policy and innovation, on which I’ve organized four panels:
- Localizing the Lisbon Strategy – How to Cultivate Innovation Ecosystems
- Open, Closed or Somewhere In-Between? The Future of ICT and Software Innovation
- Copyrights and Patents – Incentives for (or Barriers to) Innovation Creation?
- Distributing Your Innovation: Avoiding Trade Barriers in a Flat World
We’re fortunate to have some top-notch speakers, including the Vice-President of the European Commission Gunter Verheugen, the Assistant Director of the World Intellectual Property Organization Francis Gurry, prominent open source advocate Larry Rosen, and Federico Etro, a professor at the University of Milan and President of Intertic (an International Think-tank on Innovation and Competition).
"Do Napisania" w Polsce (I’ll be writing from Poland)
You’ll have to listen to the latest Tech Liberation Front podcast to get the full
thought-provoking discussion on copyright law and the first sale doctrine, but
let me tease out a portion of the discussion on extending the first sale to apply
to use in addition to transfer.
The main focus of the podcast is a case Fred von Lohmann and EFF are defending concerning the "first sale" doctrine of copyright law. Fred describes first sale on the EFF website:
The idea, set out in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, is simple: once you’ve acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. In simpler terms, "you bought it, you own it" (and because first sale also applies to gifts,
"they gave it to you, you own it" is also true).
While Fred’s right when he says "you bought it, you own it" that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want with a copyrighted work. First sale
currently only applies to transfers of the copyrighted good. Fred said in the podcast that he would like to see the first sale doctrine expanded into the area of "use." Extending it to use means content owners
couldn’t use a copyright license to enforce certain use restrictions, such as the sharing and presentation of copyrighted material. Although this wasn’t mentioned on the podcast, I think this would have the effect of expanding "fair use."
Fred surely thinks this liberal copyright world would benefit consumers and society writ large – but it would come at some costs, too. The reality is that content creators would impose use
restrictions in other ways, especially for legitimate price and market segmentation (ie. for software, discounted OEM copies are often labeled "not for resale" to avoid competing with the normal retail channel). This would have to be done by using contract, not copyright law.
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That didn’t take long. People have apparently developed a robust and user-friendly way to install third-party applications on your iPhone. Awesome.
And it’s already got Doom, albeit without controls.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.