One of my favorite blogs over the last couple of years has been bookofjoe.com. It’s a compendium of interesting items, not the least of which are articles that the blogs owner/author has read in the New York Times or other newspapers and has reproduced on his site with full links and attributions to the source. The fact that he doesn’t excerpt but instead provides the article in full has caused some consternation with some of the ink-stained wretches lawyers.
Case in point is the Charlottesville Daily Progress‘s (Joe lives in Charlottesville, VA) lawyer Andrew Carington. He sent a lengthly cease and desist letter to Joe who promptly posted it on his blog for all to see. Joe points out that he’s pretty sure that the authors of the articles probably wouldn’t agree with the lawyer’s move since getting a placement on his site vastly expands their audience. I’d have to agree, and I’d go so far as to say that Media General is making a business mistake by going after him (I’m not going to argue the legality of Joe’s practice since I’m no copyright expert).
Here’s my thinking. The Daily Progress is a local paper owned by the same company that owns my hometown paper The Winston-Salem Journal. I’d say it’s safe to assume that both newspapers get the majority of their traffic from folks within their region. On the other hand Joe gets a lot of his traffic from all over the internet tubes so by getting a link from his site the newspaper is getting exposure to a much broader audience than they do on their own. And guess what? We’re talking major traffic.
I went to Compete.com and ran a quick comparison between bookofjoe.com and dailyprogress.com. If you look at the screenshot on the left (click on it to see it at full size) you’ll see that while the Daily Progress does have a bit more traffic than Joe it ain’t by much (63,341 visitors vs. 55,262) and you’ll also see that Joe’s traffic is trending up much more quickly than the Daily Progress. You’d think they’d love the opportunity to get their name and a link to their site out there to such a growing audience. Heck, Joe’s offering them free syndication.
But I’m sure the honchos at Media General are thinking that Joe’s getting rich off their work…oh wait, he doesn’t take advertising. So maybe he’s not getting rich off of their work, so maybe it’s the principle of the thing. But I’m a cynic so I’m thinking they’re just ticked because one guy writing in his bathrobe in his condo is pulling almost as much traffic as their newspaper with dozens of employees and they think they can push him around. Whatever their motivation it’s a dumb move.
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Befuddled 
I support the principles of Fair Use. Copying all of, or even the vast majority of, someone else’s work to your site without permission is not cool, no matter who you are or who they are or who gets money or who doesn’t. It’s simply not OK.
Well, for the sake of argument what does this say about Google cacheing every site that it has in its index? Shouldn’t they be held to the same standard? Joe is doing much the same thing, but he’s not making a dime off of it while Google is making a pile of money. Google has been sued in the past (when they acquired Youtube they were sued by Viacom about some videos posted there), but I don’t think any of the print publishers have taken them on. My take is that the publishing companies realize they get more business than they lose because of links from Google (even with the cacheing) and also because they don’t want to take on Google’s lawyers. Joe, on the other hand, is an easy target because he doesn’t have Google’s lawyers and I’m also willing to bet they didn’t know his traffic was almost as much as their site’s. Honestly I think the better business decision would have been to leave him alone, or even figure out a way to work with him.
All that said I don’t feel comfortable copying all of any article to my site so I excerpt and link, and honestly I think that would be a better idea for Joe, but I don’t agree that Media General is being harmed by his activity. In fact they probably get more readers from him who go on to read other articles than they lose to him copying their work. Now if he was pulling the entirety of every article, every day then I’d say he’s causing them great harm. But he’s not, and I think he’s actually doing them more good than harm and I’d still argue that they should leave him alone and enjoy the increased exposure he brings them.
I’d look at it this way if I’m Media General:
A. His site and ours have different audiences.
B. An article on his site introduces us to a new set of readers.
C. If even 1% of them click over to our site then we get hundreds or thousands of additional readers.
D. If x% of our site visitors click through on x number of pages then that’s an extra x number of ad impressions we’ve sold
E. How do we get even more free traffic out of this guy?
If nothing else I’d ask myself:
A. How much traffic are we losing to this guy?
B. Is it worth the effort to take him to court?
Either way I think you come to the conclusion that you leave the guy alone.
Is it worth it to take him to court? Maybe, maybe not.
Is it worth it to send out a fairly boilerplate letter asking him to cease and desist? Yes.
Why? Because if MG is aware of it and does not send him such a letter, later on it could be argued that they tacitly were condoning it? Because if they let him get away with it, what about the next 1000 people who come along?
The bottom line is that MG paid money to acquire exclusive rights to certain content and to the distribution of certain content. They don’t *have* to share.
Stingy? Possibly.
Well within their rights? Absolutely.
“All that said I don’t feel comfortable copying all of any article to my site so I excerpt and link…”
Yes. Exactly. Especially since this option exists, I have little sympathy for those who catch the fallout for taking things that aren’t theirs.
Well, I think we’re gonna have to agree to disagree on this one. I think it’s precisely because they spent money on creating their original content that they should embrace Joe and others like him. I truly believe they’ll get more readers in the long run, which means they’ll get more ad revenue which will then allow them to create more content.
Now if some local yokel came along and tried to rip every article from every issue and pass it as his own and sell advertising then that would be different. If you think of a newspaper as a book and each article as a chapter, and then look at how good it is for book publishers to have whole chapters appear on Google or Amazon, I think you get in the neighborhood of what I’m talking about. It’s not a perfect comparison (articles are more self-contained that chapters of a book) but I think that the exposure that the paper gets is very valuable and is a net gain for them.
And for the specific case of Joe, since he isn’t a commercial enterprise (i.e. he’s not making any money) does his practice violate fair use? That’s not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.