Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Wikileaks Ethics in Journalism

In a recent OpEd in the New York Times, media ethicist Kelly McBride generally stands by the principle that journalists should not pay sources for information; but she also wants pardoxically to propose that sometimes the ends justify the means.  Specifically, she is referring to an initiative (ploy, stunt?) by Wikileaks to crowd fund a “bounty” for a leaker to provide the full text of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement. But more broadly, McBride seems unaware that there can be no exception to this rule of journalistic standards, if it is to remain a rule at all.  Because in the course of investigating hard news, when don’t the ends appear to justify the means?  Surely, there are reporters out there risking their lives to uncover stories that are more grave and more time-sensitive than a trade deal, even a very big trade deal.

But that central contradiction is not the only reason I think McBride’s OpEd misses the point in its analysis. What she says is that, in general, paying for information is still wrong but that extreme situations call for extreme measures until some balance is restored between transparency and secrecy.  She writes, “Right now, the bounty may be the best shot we have at transforming the TPP process from a back-room deal to an open debate. But we need a better system to discourage unjustified secrecy, to protect sources and to encourage public-interest whistle-blowing.”  Although earlier in the piece, McBride acknowledges, “It’s true that trade deals, which are usually about tariffs and the price of goods, are traditionally negotiated in secret. But the TPP exceeds agreements like Nafta in scope and scale and involves far-reaching foreign policy decisions.”

The funny thing to me about the TPP kerfuffle is that everyone is complaining both about how bad it is and about how secret it is without noticing that the latter complaint casts considerable doubt on the former.  And thanks to the headline-rich, substance-poor nature of social media, even the tidbits of information out there are being manipulated by players with their own agendas, including such mundanity as just making click-bait.  As a result, many of my friends now take as gospel rumors about possible proposals or outcomes of this deal that are entirely unfounded.  For instance, McBride sets up her larger premise, establishing the TPP’s obvious badness with this almost parenthetical statement:  “Chapters already leaked suggest that the deal restricts fair use of copyrighted material, expands medical patents and weakens public policies that govern net neutrality.”  From such statements, we are left to wonder what other nefarious proposals lurk within the TPP and to conclude, yes, the ends justify Wikileaks’s means of offering to buy a leak.

But what if many of those highly publicized assumptions based on earlier partial leaks are false or at least very misleading?  Certainly, the statement about restricting fair use is fallacious, either by design or by ignorance, and we don’t need the full text of TPP proposals to know why.  For one thing, trade deals generally do not change domestic law in the U.S.; and to imply that ratifying the TPP might alter our application of fair use is inconsistent with history and with the process presently being applied.  Second, trading partner nations cannot necessarily apply U.S.-style fair use because (hold onto your hats) they have different legal systems. (I hear they speak different languages, too.)

But here’s the insidious detail in the big picture:  McBride writes what seems like a reasonable editorial with a premise that takes for granted a false assumption like this one about fair use, unaware perhaps that this widely-spread rumor is actually a modification of an Internet-industry-backed effort to “export U.S. fair use doctrine” through FTAs to our trading partners. These companies would favor replicating our liberal application of this doctrine and even imply that U.S. copyright holders are against such a provision, but this is a mischaracterization. It is more accurate to say that our trading partners don’t have the constitutional foundation to apply doctrine as we do.  I know that’s a too complex and wonky to make a good Facebook meme or grabby headline, but that’s the point.

So, even with this one tiny matter about which much corn has been shucked, we’re witnessing a giant game of Telephone.   Silicon Valley-funded organizations say “export fair use doctrine” to start the game, and this translates to “TPP will harm fair use” by the time the message comes full circle in the form of an OpEd in the New York Times.  So, is it really logical to believe that more leaked text about even more complex issues and filtered through even more vested interests will help us make more informed decisions?  I have more than a few doubts.

Meanwhile, the TPP isn’t classified; it’s embargoed.  Journalists committed to their principles are familiar with the need to embargo a story, perhaps to ensure someone’s safety prior to publication, and it would be a shame if that kind of judgment call were inappropriately reclassified as censorship just because we now have these machines that confuse our right to know with our right to know right bloody now.  The scale and scope of the TPP are unprecedented, but the level of secrecy is not. Negotiating trade deals through real-time public referendum would be like trying to play poker while everybody’s kid brothers run around the table shouting out who’s holding which cards.  What is also unprecedented (and frankly fascinating) is that the TPP is the first trade deal to be negotiated in the age of social media, which provides what I will continue to insist a fairly opaque form of transparency at best.

In fact, I suspect one of two outcomes would be the result of Wikileaks’s brand of un-alloyed “transparency” in this case:  one would be a collapse of trade deals altogether, but the other would be truly unprecedented secrecy indeed.  As journalist Christopher Dickey points out in this 2010 piece about State Department leaks by Wikileaks, “To avoid this kind of massive leak in the future, documents will get higher classification and less distribution, and a lot of the most important stuff may not be committed to the keyboard at all.” Oversight through the filter of  representation and principled journalists is imperfect, but a much bigger question than the one McBride is asking is whether we want to be a nation that does imperfect things as a republic or a nation that doesn’t do anything because we choose to embrace the near anarchy of direct democracy?

To be sure, I feel, as many of my fellow progressives do, that we have ceded far too much power to corporations overall, allowing deregulatory trends to foster wealth consolidation, poor environmental policy, weaker labor rights, and downgrades in education, medicine, infrastructure, and other foundational enterprises.  If we hope to address any of these issues, we need to find the political will to do so through domestic policy, investment, and the representation we choose to elect. In the meantime, it doesn’t seem helpful to perpetuate confusion about what trade deals can and cannot do to our domestic laws, let alone to cite that confusion as a reason for serious journalists to abandon their hard-won principles.  Frankly, I think we have enough hacks.

TVEyes Warping Fair Use Principle

Once again the Electronic Frontier Foundation has taken up the cause of industry in the guise of public interest, principally with the ultimate goal of distorting fair use doctrine beyond its intended purpose.  I am speaking about the case of FoxNews v TVEyes, which as Terry Hart points out in this post on Copyhype, re-treads some familiar ground regarding the copyright interests of news producing entities and the fair use claims of news monitoring services.  I recommend Hart’s blog for more in-depth historical context; but suffice to say that in the early 1990s, bills proposed by Senator Orin Hatch that would have amended copyright law to add news monitoring to the list of fair use purposes never made much progress. But, as Hart writes, “…the lack of legislation did not jeopardize the broadcast news monitoring industry. Nevertheless, little has changed in the discussion of fair use and news monitoring from the early 90s to the current litigation involving Fox News and TVEyes.”

Last fall, a federal judged ruled in this case that copying “broadcast content for indexing and clipping services to its subscribers constitutes fair use.”  And this July, oral arguments will be heard as to whether or not other services (like subscribers downloading, storing, and emailing clips) might also be judged fair.  The EFF, along with the Technology Law & Policy Clinic at NYU School of Law, has filed an amicus brief on behalf of TVEyes, while several leading news organizations have filed a brief on behalf of Fox.

To be clear, plenty has changed technologically in the news monitoring world, but Terry Hart’s point above is that the fair use argument being made today in favor of TVEyes is fundamentally the same as the arguments that failed in Congress twenty years ago — namely that there is a public and First Amendment-serving purpose to news monitoring that should qualify the enterprise as a fair use of copyrighted material.  And be it far from me to second guess a federal judge, but it seems that technological changes have only weakened this argument, not strengthened it, particularly when we look at the specific business model of TVEyes itself.

News monitoring services have been around since before television, first in the form of clipping services for print, and later as video systems monitoring broadcasts of “hard news” that was captured and stored on tape. This enabled customers to order a specific broadcast clip for educational, documentary, reporting, and other communications and investigative purposes.  We used these services in the 1990s during my corporate communications days. You paid a service a small fee to do a search and then received a VHS tape with the clip(s) you needed.  Today looks very different.

Presently, TVEyes copies, stores, and indexes round-the-clock broadcasts from 1,400 channels, and this includes programming that exceeds traditional models for “hard news” monitoring, capturing entertainment programs like magazine-format shows and documentaries.  Moreover, TVEyes is a fairly elite, B2B service; and it seems to me that fair use exceptions in the name of the public’s right to information ought to be limited to those uses that actually serve the public. But you and I do not use TVEyes, and we never will because a subscription costs $500/month.  So, as a business, TVEyes is not even a consumer-focused service, but an industry-focused service used by professionals who need to be ahead of the proverbial curve when it comes to breaking and overlapping news stories.  Such professionals include news organizations like the Associated Press, major corporations, government agencies and NGOs, and of course high-level investors who are skilled in the dark arts of predicting how a traffic jam in Malaysia might affect their position in shoe laces or something.

Clearly, this $6,000/year service is not for the general citizenry that has a right to be informed. In fact, it’s interesting that one argument being made today on behalf of TVEyes — as it was twenty years ago for news monitoring in general — is that there is “so much information out there”, that these services are invaluable.  And they are invaluable for the types of clients that need and can afford them. Meanwhile, the public-serving aspect of the fair use argument here seems to overlook this free technology we all have called the search engine.  Yes, there is more information produced more rapidly by more sources than ever before; but the average citizen also has more free tools to search, index, and access that information than ever before.  Isn’t that what Google congratulates itself for doing at every opportunity?  And setting aside the chicken-and-egg quality of these phenomena, the bottom line is that you and I can search news items all day long on just about any subject we can imagine, which has nothing to do with the high-priced and  specialized service provided by TVEyes.  The logic being applied is akin to saying that because the public has a right to know what happens in the financial markets, Reuters should not have to honor licensing deals for any of the content it aggregates to its elite Reuters Insider service that it sells at a premium to investment professionals.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with TVEyes. It’s a sound business and clearly provides a service that many companies and institutions consider well worth the subscription fee.  But as a for-profit entity providing a high-level, B2B service for institutional clients, it should not be allowed to profit from the use of assets produced by Fox or any other entity without paying reasonable licensing fees.  More importantly, it is dismaying to see fair use doctrine distorted on the basis that the general public is in any way served in this case. It moves the needle of legal precedent closer to the Internet and tech industry goal of monetizing the totality of works without paying the individuals or entities who produce them.  This neither serves any beneficial social practice nor any larger ideological principle.  It’s just an old-fashioned land grab and a big middle finger to the evicted. Fair Use is not what we mean when we say “FU.”

The Comic Strip as Model in the Digital Age

I just watched a fun little documentary film called Stripped (2014) made by David Kellett and Frederick Schroeder about comic strip creators. The film features interviews with veteran artists whose careers were born in the syndicated market as well as contemporary cartoonists whose work never graced a newspaper but instead found an audience in cyberspace. Every artist interviewed generally seemed to agree (editing notwithstanding) that the digital revolution resulted in an explosion of fresh, bold creative work in the medium and even provided a path for both new and established artists to make some kind of living in response to the shrinking newspaper market. Although Greg Evans, creator of Luan, does say that the Web is “pennies to the syndicate’s dollars,” several voices in the film did echo most, if not all, of the major talking points that critics like me tend to ascribe solely to those “tech-utopians” we like to remind our readers are not creators themselves.

These comic strip artists talked about adaptation, new models, new revenue streams, P2P relationships, the whole shebang. And I admit that I haven’t thought about comic strips in years because it’s been that long since I last spread a Sunday Times across the dining table. (Plus, I’m not really over the demise of Bloom County.) But having watched this film, it makes a certain amount of sense that the comic strip might (and I mean might) fare better in the digital age than other media. Or to look at it another way, what can work well for comic strips is instructive with regard to what does not work for other media, including of course comic books and graphic novels, which are different animals altogether.

As I say, I hadn’t thought much about this medium in this context, but several qualities unique to the comic strip do seem well suited by the new-model mantras of our times. In fact, the first image that popped into my head was one of those spreadsheets used to compare and contrast products or services. While there are always exceptions, if we’re going to consider these columns honestly in a way that reflects general rules, this is how it might look:

Comics Comparison

Each of the media listed might theoretically receive a check in every box, but I think it’s notable that comic strips seem to run the table, at least from a casual observation. Stripped also highlights a tradition of adaptation among these artists, citing the interesting fact that  the comic strip as a medium was the result of a class of talented book engravers put out of work by the invention of photography. And though the digital revolution may require some adapting by the contemporary comic strip creator, it does seem less like the kind of radical and unsustainable metamorphosis our new-age gurus presume to demand of creators in other media.

Comic strips are serial in nature, traditionally change daily, and are short-form experiences, which are all attractive qualities to a Web-based audience one hopes to draw consistently to a single site. Comics are also typically produced by a single creator who almost never relies on skilled outside labor to complete the work. And because comics create unique, iconic images, they are natural foundations for potential merchandise opportunities that can become primary rather than ancillary sources of revenue. Fan interaction is, of course, possible with any medium, but based on what I gleaned from the documentary, I got the sense of a natural symbiosis between creating a daily dose of humor or poignancy and regular interaction with loyal readers.

Overall, the qualities of the comic strip that seem to complement the opportunities of the digital age also appear to make them resistant to the threat of the digital age — piracy. And I imagine comics could be relatively piracy resistant, inasmuch as there is no inherent reason a fan won’t go to an official site to see the day’s strip rather than an unlicensed site, when both options are free and equally accessible. Nevertheless, some “fans” still fail to honor artist’s requests to not repost works without permission; and predatory site owners do scrape official comics hosts just as they do with photographs, lyrics, or just about any other asset they can use to siphon web traffic that a creator has legitimately earned for herself.

This is relevant because so many of the new-model theories presuming to tell creators how they should produce and distribute their works are repeated either as justifications for piracy or as proposed workarounds to render piracy irrelevant. Yet, we continue to see that even as low-cost or free alternatives for accessing media are employed, either outright pirate sites or semi-legal predatory sites continue to hijack valuable traffic away from producers. Meanwhile, even if the comic strip artist does prove to be one of the best poised to diversify and take advantage of the digital revolution, the piracy apologists and “copyright is dead” crowd remain eager to cut off alternative revenue sources, like merchandising, which would be meaningless without a legal framework for licensing.

No question the comic strip is an interesting medium to watch, but there are a lot of assumptions floating around out there that what might work for one medium or creator will work for all others, and this simply isn’t the case.