On 23 April the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) held a conference entitled "Copyright, related rights and the news in the EU: Assessing potential new laws" at the University of Amsterdam.
The difficulties of commercial journalism
Like music and other branches of publishing, commercial news journalism has faced radical challenges over the last two decades. There is talk of the "death of the newspaper" and questions have been raised about the very future of journalism. While with music, books and films, the greatest threat to existing business models have been seen as the unauthorised and unremunerated home copying and peer-to-peer distribution, with commercial news journalism much of the challenge derives from the fact that advertising has not followed the shift of print-newspapers to the Internet. Such difficulties are compounded, from the point of view of news publishers, by the relatively free availability of news from other online sources. And they’ve been further compounded by the recent rise of social media, particularly Facebook, as a main route to the news.
Questions that arise
Is there sufficient rationale to alter copyright or related laws in a way that benefits news publishers? Should commercial news publishers benefit from any change in the law, given that other means exist for gathering and disseminating news? How strong is an economic case for such a right? To what extent is any economic case for change supplemented by other arguments, such as reward and natural rights arguments, and arguments about media plurality? Should European law treat news publishers in a similar way to other content producers, such as phonogram producers and broadcasters, who benefit from a related right? Would individual journalists benefit from a right afforded to news publishers, and if so, to what extent? Should news publishers benefit from levies and compensation schemes designed to benefit author-journalists?
This one day conference at IViR sought to address these questions. The conference was part of a two-year, AHRC funded project at CIPIL, Cambridge University, entitled Appraising Potential Legal Responses to Threats to the Production of News in a Digital Environment, which the IViR kindly hosted and facilitated.
The conference brought together an interdisciplinary combination of academics and practitioners to discuss the issue, including representatives from news producing, publishing and disseminating organizations, both traditional and online.
Video recordings of the four sessions comprising the conference are now available on the conference page.