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Acquiring Internet Content: Piracy or Partnership?
Web publishers face a challenging environment in 2009. The Internet continues to generate more Web sites (over 239 million as of July 1) for users to enjoy, but a recent survey2 indicates that time spent on the Internet is leveling off. Further, while online advertising has held up better than more traditional media, it too has been softening of late (down to 5.5 percent in the first quarter, according to one source3).
Together, these trends indicate that the online marketplace is becoming fiercely competitive. This makes it vitally important for publishers to give their users content that will attract them and keep them coming back. But these same competitive factors severely limit the resources most publishers can devote to generating their own unique content. Further, advertisers are showing a marked preference for professionally produced (expensive) content over user-generated (inexpensive) content, which reduces the viability of business models based on the latter. 4
So, how are publishers to obtain needed content beyond what they can create themselves? In two possible ways:
- Piracy: simply taking material from other Web sites without their consent
- Partnership: generally means syndication
In both cases, the same content appears on more than one Web site. This sharing makes a lot of sense: In a highly fragmented environment, expanded distribution makes it easier for users to find a useful or entertaining piece of content. However, there is a vitally important difference between piracy and partnership that has implications for the Internet as a generator of original content.
Internet Content Syndication
The formal definition of syndication is "the placement of the same content on multiple partnering Internet destinations."5 It is a system that has been successful in generating content in many forms of media -- from television to newspapers -- because it works to the advantage of content producers, distributors, and often, advertisers as well.
Through syndication, content owners get their material distributed widely and are remunerated either by license fees from media partners or higher advertising revenue due to the larger audiences. Syndication works well for media partners too because it shares the cost of the content across multiple partners; therefore, it makes available higher-quality content than each could afford individually. For advertisers who associate their ads with the content, it means that the huge but fragmented Internet audience can be aggregated in larger segments. Syndication also ensures that their ads are associated with editorial content that is appropriate for their products.
However, this system is based on a partnership: The Internet destinations give value -- either through license fees or augmented ad revenues -- for value received. If they merely grab content without remunerating the content owner, the system breaks down.
Piracy
"Piracy is not theft," proclaims a Web site,6 because the material is not taken away from the owner but is merely copied. That is more than a little disingenuous: If the pirating Web site takes content from elsewhere without compensation and sells advertising on it, it puts itself in competition with the owner, and in effect, steals revenue in which the owner should rightfully share. A pirate, then, is no better than a thief, even if the term -- thanks to Jack Sparrow -- is more romantic. In the long run, piracy can damage the system by reducing the revenue that the producer needs to create quality content.
Piracy is a hot topic, and as noted above, it has advocates. "Information wants to be free!" -- the original quote, said at the 1984 Hackers’ Conference, is attributed to Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog. But a corollary that is quoted less often is Brand’s full statement7: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away."
Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, suggests that giving content away can be a useful tactic for marketers. If, thanks to the Internet, the cost of distribution is close to zero, then money can be made by giving away some content (e.g., by getting a few users to pay for special content or by receiving advertisers’ support).
But note that in both cases, the content provider gets remunerated, which only results from partnership. These are, in fact, well-established tactics that other media have long used. The first is the use of "loss leaders," as in giving away razors but selling the blades. If the content does not carry that offer upfront, it is de facto pirated when another site copies it. Advertising is of course the main underpinning of many types of media, but if the copying Web site does not carry advertising that has been sold by the owner or share its ad revenues, it is likewise a pirate.8
It is clear that someone has to pay for content, whether it’s the government (as with libraries), companies eager to get their product information out or advertisers trying to reach potential buyers. Unless there is a revenue source, eventually there is no content.9
Tracking Piracy
Because it’s a threat to the system, piracy has garnered a lot of attention these days. In August, a federal jury fined a Rhode Island graduate student $675,000 for illegally downloading and distributing music from four record labels. In April, the owners of Pirate Bay, a music-sharing Web site, were fined and jailed for copyright infringement. Also in April, The Associated Press announced plans to take legal action against Web sites that publish stories from the AP or its member newspapers without permission.10
A number of companies offer content owners services that track the use of their content on the Web. One such organization is Attributor, a Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that works with a number of news publishers, including Reuters, The New York Times and Hearst.
Attributor Vice President Rich Pearson says the company creates a digital fingerprint of its clients’ text or video content. (It doesn’t handle images.) It then crawls 35 billion Web pages, starting with the most popular commercial sites, to find copies of the original. It can give its clients page view estimates, sites where their content appears, and information regarding whether advertising is present and which ad networks are running ads on their content.
"Anti-piracy and content syndication are closely aligned," says Pearson. He cites three possible steps content producers can take to assert copyright privileges once pirated copies11 have been identified:
- Revenue Sharing: Notify the appropriate ad networks of the piracy and send them a payment request. Pearson says Attributor has found that 90 percent of the ads on pirated content are spread across a small group of ad networks -- the majority from Yahoo and Google -- and it is much more efficient to deal with the networks than to chase down the individual Web sites.
- Revenue Prevention: If the ad networks do not agree to share the revenue, rights owners should request that the networks remove the ads from the infringing page, as a way to prevent the site from monetizing the content.
- Takedown: In the worst-case scenario, both the pirate and the major search engines can be sent a takedown request.
Note that the first step -- the most preferable one -- is to turn the pirate into a partner, thereby creating a syndication arrangement for mutual benefit.
iCopyright, another company seeking to address the issue of piracy and copyright, places a copyright insignia on content in an effort to "help business professionals instantly secure the rights to use and share content while maintaining copyright compliance." Unlike Attributor, it does not crawl the Web to enforce compliance; rather, it tries to create an honor system by signaling to would-be users that they need to obtain permission to use the content. Still another company, Scribd, offers a system that allows publishers to post documents on their Web sites in a secured widget. Redistributors, such as bloggers, can repost the document on their site only through the widget and cannot extract the raw text. Scribd can also use the widget to track precisely which sites reuse the content.12
While none of these is necessarily the ultimate solution to piracy, it is clear that the problem needs to be addressed. Enlightened self-interest would suggest that pirates need to become partners if the Internet is to remain a vital generator of original, high-quality content.
- Netcraft. http://news.netcraft.com>.
- Forrester survey, cited in "The Web is Flat." Ad Age. 29 July 2009. <http://http://adage.com/abstract.php?article_id=138159>.
- "Internet advertising slumps in first quarter." CNET News. 7 June 2009.
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10258972-93.html?tag=mncol>.
- See, for example, the ICSC May 2009 newsletter “Syndication: The Solution to Media
Chaos,” which contrasts the advertising acceptance of Hulu versus YouTube.
- "Internet Content Syndication, Content Creation and Distribution in an Expanding Internet
Universe: A White Paper.
" May 2008. <http://internetsyndication.org/reports/index.html>.
- Lamb, Scott. "Piracy Vs. Theft." BuzzFeed.<http://www.buzzfeed.com/scott/piracy-vs-theft>.
- "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT." Viking Penguin. 1987:p. 202. Quoted in Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free#cite_note-clarke-0#cite_note-clarke-0>.
- The notion that something is "free" because it is ad-supported is also a misconception. The advertiser is willing to pay because he gets something of value: the attention, however slight, of the user. Many consumers of media think this is a fair bargain as long as the advertising exposure is reasonable. But consider the difference between a TV show with seven minutes of commercials in a half-hour [the broadcast standard] and one with 30 minutes -- known as infomercials. In the latter case, viewers are asked for far more of their attention than many would find acceptable.
- As Dr. Johnson famously said, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote but for money." The
rising number of blogs would seem to contradict him (or suggest that blockheads are not
in short supply), but the many abandoned blogs -- 95 percent, according to one survey <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html> -- would not.
- "AP to take on Web piracy, cut rates." Physorg. 6 April 2009. <http://www.physorg.com/news158261455.html>.
- Attributor, which deals primarily with news content, is careful to distinguish between piracy, in which the full copy of the content is published, and excerpted content, which may be legal under fair use guidelines.
- Hessel, Evan."To the Rescue: Newspaper Content Cops." 22 May 2009. <http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/21/online-piracy-newspapers-business-media-advertising.html>.
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