Jason Fry gets it. He really gets it. In a Wall Street Journal Online column, Fry thumbs his nose at the Copiepresse lawsuit against Google for linking to local newspaper articles. Google, the Belgian newspaper association says, should ask permission before linking and then link only to publications’ home pages. When Google links to individual articles, after all, the newspapers are losing money.
As Fry points out, this isn’t a new argument. Going all the way back to Ticketmaster getting ornery about Microsoft’s Sidewalk linking to its content, content providers have tried to control hypertext links. Didn’t happen then. Ain’t going to happen now.
“Whether or not content creators like it, this is the age of fragmentation. In industry after industry, consumers are voting with their feet against old methods of packaging and distributing information. They want to pick and choose what’s of interest to them, without having to pay for or wade through what isn’t. That change, midwived by technology, has shaken or shattered content companies’ business models. It’s made everything they do more risky. And it’s stripped them of power they once enjoyed, forcing them to work with new companies and industries that somehow got to set the rules. Faced with such a situation, it’s understandable that content creators are angry. But the chance to set the ground rules passed some time ago, and it’s high time for content creators to realize that and adjust.”
Insight like this is extremely rare in print. Fry acknowledges that more than anything, anything, writers want to be read and we don’t care how you find our material. Just that you do. And therein lies the coming schism between the content creators and the content providers. The content creators who bother to think about it usually come around to getting it; content providers, not so much.
“At its heart, the Web is driven by users, not publishers. Whatever pain that causes content creators, opposing that fundamental idea became a revanchist fantasy long ago.”
(It means a “policy of reclaiming territory.” I had to look it up too.)
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