The copyright stuff turns another page: the Internet and digital technology are the biggest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg ruined the monks' monopoly on book production, and once again printers and publishers are in danger of having their entire business models turned upside down

Risk & Insurance, Nov, 2005 by Patricia Vowinkel

Not since the arrival of the printing press in the 15th century has the publishing world gone through such profound change. Before the invention of the printing press, it might have taken a year or more for someone to hand copy a Bible. With the Gutenberg press, it became possible to create several hundred copies a year. Works that once circulated only among a privileged few could now be copied and distributed and put into the hands of ordinary people.

Now the Internet and digital technology are once again wrecking the old, tried-and-true business models. With the push of a button, news articles, books, and even entire libraries can be copied and distributed throughout the world in seconds.

Copyright laws did a fine job of protecting publishers in the days of ink and paper. But as the monks discovered so many hundreds of years ago, it is not easy to stand in the way of a technological revolution.

"One problem it (the new technology) is creating is it makes it more difficult for publishers to protect their work product, their intellectual property, particularly their copyrights," says Chad Milton, senior vice president, national practice leader for media liability with broker Marsh & McLennan. "The stuff is so readily copyable by others."

Like the music and movie industries, publishing is facing a big challenge as a result of new technology.

"The thing that joins all of those three industries is that their worlds are being rocked, in different degrees, by digitization of technology," says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Copyright laws are part of a larger body of laws that are designed to protect intellectual property, including trademarks and patents.

"The core is purely economic," says Ken Richieri, deputy general counsel for the New York Times Co. "It is to incentivize people to create works of arts; as well as inventions, which are patented, and to market them under unique brands, which is trademarks. That's what the IP laws are designed to do. That principle is something that made sense in the 1700s, and it makes sense now."

The original Copyright Act granted authors 14 years of exclusive control over their works. The term has been extended--it is now life plus 70 years for individual authors and 95 years for corporations, according to "Copyright and Digital Media in a Post-Napster World," a white paper put out by GartnerG2 and the Berkman Center.

Although copyright laws have long been used to protect works of art, music and writing, the law also allows for fair use of the copyrighted works, so that the public interest also is promoted.

This has raised questions, however, about what constitutes fair use. It's one thing to make a copy of a song and give it to a few friends. But when Napster turns everyone with a computer into your closest friend, then technology has destroyed the limiting principle that made copyrights work, Richieri says.

The recording industry may have won its fight with Napster, but it faces even more difficult challenges with newer versions of file-sharing software that allows users to swap hundreds of songs and which aren't as easily contained.

And as ever-higher-speed Internet services make it possible to transfer not just short clips but whole movies over the Web, the film industry is facing a similar battle as the music companies before it.

In the publishing industry, the battles are just beginning because things like blogs, podcasts and RSS (Really Simple Syndication)--a format for distributing and gathering content from sources across the Web--are only just catching on with the general public. And as the technology advances and use of it becomes more widespread, expect more lawsuits.

The Authors Guild, for instance, has filed a suit against Google claiming massive copyright infringement because of Google's plans to copy all of the works in several major libraries. Google plans to copy the works and then make snippets of them available to the public over a searchable database. The authors say it is not right for Google to copy the works in the libraries without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holders.

The biggest battles, however, are not expected to take place over book publishing because so far e-books have not been very popular with consumers.

BUSINESS MODEL CHALLENGE

The big issue is for newspaper and magazine publishers who are seeing their entire business model challenged.

"Magazines and newspapers are a totally different ball of wax," Palfrey says. "The threat is much more real, and more immediate in both instances. I would characterize it as part copyright-related matter, but it is much more about the extent to which individuals or small groups or nontraditional publishers can put content out on the Internet and syndicate it very easily and cheaply to a worldwide audience in a way they couldn't before," he says.

Because magazines and newspapers are advertising supported, the threat comes not so much from copyright violations, but from competition from online news sources and a shift in customer habits.