European newspapers demand success

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Andrew in Newspapers

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch has applied his usual insight to a rather unusual press release. This time the focus is on the EPC – the European Publishers Councel. Their press release demands (yes, demands) a shale up of the current intellectual property project systems in order to safeguard the future of journalism.

That’s right. According to the EPC the entire future of journalism is at stake because papers can’t make money online. In fact, they’ve been petitioning the media commissioner in Europe so they can claw back, what they see as, unpaid royalty fees from search engines (who link to content) and aggregators.

Just one thought; does Blogrunner count as a news aggregator? Isn’t that owned by the New York Times. It describes itself as a news aggregator. Would Reddit be classed as a villain? Isn’t that owned by Conde Nast?

As Robin kindly points out all the EPC’s plans are summed up in their Hamburg Declaration (which is a PDF link). This declaration isn’t being ignored by publishers and a lot of names are appearing on it. Robin’s selected except is;

Universal access to websites does not necessarily mean access at no cost. We disagree with those who maintain that freedom of information is only established when everything is available at no cost. Universal access to our services should be available, but going forward we no longer wish to be forced to give away property without having granted permission.

What do you think? Do online newspapers need to charge for reading and re-use of content? Do they need to charge people like Google who send all the traffic and readers to the newspaper in the first place?

The Brinkwire blog

European newspapers demand success