Can the Associated Press and companies like Attributor help newspapers battle Internet sites that poach their content and help them get some of that Internet revenue for themselves? Newspapers are hoping the answer is yes but not everyone is convinced.
Attributor is behind a group called the "Fair Syndication Consortium," that hopes to track down sites that are using whole newspaper articles without paying for them through a search engine developed just for that purpose. Many of these sites stealing the stories are probably blog but those blogs do receive some minimal compensation from big search engines like Google. Attributor claims the loss in revenue is as much as $250 million a year.
Attributor seems to have received a warm welcome from the newspapers and syndicates themselves. Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, told the New York Times that the plan “seems to me to be a way to bring order out of the chaos.”
The consortium is made up of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hearst, Reuters, MediaNews Group, McClatchy and Conde Nast, the magazine publisher.
But the big question is whether Google and other search engines will agree to send some of that nice Internet money back to the newspapers themselves. But so far Google and other sites have said only that they're reviewing the proposal. Saul Hansell, a media blogger for the New York Times, told the NPR radio show "On the Media," that Google and other companies seem skeptical and will likely be reluctant to get in the middle of the newspapers and the pirates.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press announced back in April that it would be tracking down illegal Internet poachers and taking legal action against them, if necessary. The idea would be to code AP stories so that the AP can track down the users.
The newspapers and the Associated Press are shouting "Show me the money." Let's hope someone hears them.
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