John Gruber has published an article about the newspaper industries attempts to put pay walls around their content. He posited several reasons why this wasn’t a good idea, but I think he missed one important point, especially when comparing newspaper content and HBO content. No one owns the news.
Take a news worthy event, the death of a pop star for example. News organisation A is the first to hear of the event, so they publish a story. This doesn’t prevent anyone else from publishing their take on the same event. Party A has no rights to prevent anyone else reporting the event. No one has to pay them to report on the event. Even for exclusives there is nothing to stop other news organisations reporting the event. The best they can do is try to monetise the fact that they got there first or got more information as a result of the exclusivity.
If you witness an event that is ‘news worthy’ there is no law that says you can’t tell other people about it. The result of this is that anyone can report the news whether they are a multi billion dollar news conglomerate or a guy with a weblog.
Television production was being held up as an example of where pay walls, cable TV, do work. But there is a major difference here. When HBO makes a TV show, they have exclusive rights to that production. No one has the rights to broadcast that show without the permission of the producer. It is a completely difference scenario.
The one grey area seems to be sports results. A friend of mine recently started reporting horse race results but was asked to stop because the results ‘belonged’ to some one else. Why sports news happens to be different to other news I don’t know and my friend is considering challenging it in court to find out. If you go to a football match is there a law that states you can’t tell anyone else what the score was?
