This time, the nonsense comes out of the Wharton School, who one would think knows a thing or two about business.

The entire essay is based on the assertion that newspapers and print media are in trouble because one can access the first paragraphs of those outlets’ stories on sites like Google News. For reasons that are not clearly explained, but rather assumed, the essayists insist:

This suggests tighter restrictions on the re-use of the intellectual property of others.  Fair use doctrine was never intended to protect nearly instantaneous re-posting or re-broadcast.

Aside: Since when is showing the first paragraph of a news story and providing a link to the original site re-posting or re-broadcasting?I get the impression the authors don’t distinguish between those who literally steal news stories in full and those who merely aggregate.

Their solution? Bar the aggregation of daily news stories for 24 hours after publication (in other words, after they’ve outlived their usefulness) and bar aggregation of weekly news for one week.

This alleged problem and proposed solution have numerous flaws.

1. If your first paragraph is all your story has to offer that’s worth reading, you have bigger problems than web traffic. Did everyone forget how writing works? If you write a good story with a solid lede, people will want to read more than is available on Google. It really is that simple. Better writing = more click-throughs.  More click-throughs = more online ad revenue.

2. And furthermore, most news sites actually write those summarizing ledes and super basic headlines because they actively are working to be listed high in web searches. Yes, they want Google to use their stories for reason #2. You can’t beg Google to take your content and then complain when they do.

3. Somehow the academics also seem to gloss over the fact that the Googles of the world are the #1 source of incoming traffic to news websites. They lament the declining online ad revenue, but fail to mention that what ad revenue news sites get is largely due to traffic from aggregators.

4. The essayists close with:

We believe that copyright law needs to be revised, and made both shorter and more draconian if journalism is to survive and (2) we believe that the hot news doctrine may offer some relief to traditional media, but not in its current, 90 year old form.

Some backstory, if you don’t know it:

In what started as a plan to get a lawyer’s name in the news became an incredibly uninformed column by Schultz and eventually evolved into embarrassing sideshow that has a newspaper pulled into an effort trying to limit the First Amendment rights of bloggers and asking other sites not to give them web traffic. Oh, and it also calls aggregators, RSS readers and bloggers “parasites”. Nice work, guys (facepalm).

This “plan” to change U.S. copyright law, put forth by David and Daniel Marburger (brothers and a lawyer and economist, respectively), seeks to ban aggregators and bloggers from linking or paraphrasing news content within the first 24 hours of its creation.

TechDirt has an excellent analysis on all of the things that are wrong about this half-baked plan. The least of which is that it conveniently ignores significant traffic their own site gets from aggregators every day. I can speak with some knowledge on that fact – Cleveland’s website regularly features links to our stories that regularly show up as popular referrers in our traffic reports (and we love them for it).

As Jeff Sonderson also points out, the PD would be outraged if they themselves were held to this standard. We all would:

How would the Cleveland P-D like it if their new copyright law prohibited them for 24 hours from reporting plane and train crashes, celebrity deaths, political scandals, or anything else that Twitter, TMZ, Talking Points Memo or the Drudge Report had first?

Schultz, for her part, really misrepresents aggregation in the first place. She says these “parasitic” aggregators “reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match.”

Actually, a true aggregator would have a headline from the originating site with a description of the story – usually auto-generated by the original site – and a link back to the original story. You know, PD, if you don’t want your stories to go out to aggregators, maybe you shouldn’t make RSS feeds available for them in the first place. Just a thought.

The Marburger report, at least, somewhat seems to understand the term, but still has the wrong bad guy. Their focus is not actually on true aggregators, but rather on bloggers and other competition in the market who don’t have a reporter on the scene for the original report, but tend to write an analysis or report based on what the original source published. This is commonplace – and I can state as a matter of fact that it is done by “professional” news outlets every day. Not to mention it is a pretty standard practice of the AP, which is featured on the PD’s news pages. Et tu, Brute? (That’s sarcasm, kids)

Depressing, isn’t it? While I agree that copyright law needs to be updated for the digital age, this isn’t what I had in mind.

In a roundabout way, this all continues to prove my point about newspapers pointing fingers at the wrong bad guys. After all – they too have links to Digg and other social sharing sites on their stories and blogs. Funny the way it is….