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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 5/30/2007 9:20:10 AM
Title: Henry doesn't go far enough
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From ROGER MOORE: While I applaud Neil Henry's column on the need for Google and other web news aggregators taking a hard look at what they're doing to American democracy by taking news content and providing it for free without paying for it, I have to say it doesn't go far enough. We can't hope that they will have this discussion without some prodding. Lawyerly prodding.

Why have we yet to hear the phrase "class action lawsuit" in this discussion? It seems to me that while the big media companies might be reluctant to go after some of Google's billions, no newspaper or news institution ("big Media") would be facing this sort of Wall St. pressure if investors knew that Google and Yahoo, et al, were going to have to part with a big portion of their billions each year in paying copyright fees, click-charges, or whatever you want to call it, to those same companies Wall Street has written off as a doomed industry.

And where are the Guilds on this? It's not the front office media emperors who are most directly impacted by this "Let's give the public less and less for the same price" cut-staff slippery slope. It's not just the public, either, though that price is almost beyond measure, in the news that is no longer covered because the staff isn't there to cover it.

It's the staff writers and editors who are being laid off in droves. It might be a lot easier to recruit members if the unions were in the forefront of insisting on compensation from the online freeloaders, compensation that would turn much of the news business around in a hurry. [Permalink]

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