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The facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship.
—Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (Feist v Rural Telephone, 1991)

But does the hunt, the research, the interviews? Or perhaps its organization into a story for the dissemination to a reading public? And can these be made exclusive? These questions have bubbled up as the newspaper industry wrestles with what the internet is doing to their business.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Connie Schultz has argued fervently about the rights of authors and their newspapers to capitalize on their product. She came out against “the aggregators” as though they were a malfeasant band of marauders bent on destroying the institution of journalism and by extension democracy. Citing Daniel and David Marburger, she claimed, “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.”

James Moroney, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News takes a similar approach. He invokes the ‘hot news’ doctrine and asks congress to apply it to the internet. Says Moroney, “perhaps it is time for congress to establish a principle of ‘consent for content’ for breaking news–similar to the ‘hot news’ doctrine recognized by a few states.”

Copyright law sufficed to protect the written word, fixed in a medium, but these claims demand remedy for a larger issue. They aim to protect the investment required to collect the facts and write a story, when it might easily be re-written and distributed by another. But they ask for monopoly control of the story itself — indeed, ownership of the collection of facts and ideas that might make up a breaking story on government corruption, for example. Justice O’Connor, however, finishes with little support for these views: “The distinction is between one of creation and one of discovery.” And discovery is not subject to property rights.

The viewpoints of Moroney, Schultz and the Marburgers have their origin in the nature of print. Print leads to a confusion between controlling the medium and controlling the content – that is, the mistaken idea that breaking a story equates to owning it. The Supreme Court compounded the confusion in 1918 with its decision to augment copyright protection with “quasi-property rights” for the facts and events that make up a news story — the hot news doctrine. It was a legal solution for the disruptive impact of a new technology: newswires. News was paper, and these rights formalized the metaphor. They derived from the physical qualities of the paper, attached property rights to the news and would provide a legal basis from which to make, in this case, the AP’s news exclusive. Theoretically, the AP could then exclude people from learning of it or reprinting it without permission. They wouldn’t just report the news, they would own the news. Read the rest of this entry »