Methods not principles needed for media regulation
Ed Richards, CEO of Ofcom, got it wrong at the Oxford Media Convention today. He said the regulatory authorities on the media had the same principles in mind. But principles are not the issue. There are plenty of codes which express the principles.
What matters is action and methods.
Desmond withdraws from PCC but no sanctions
There is little trust in the Press Complaints Commission now. Publishers like Richard Desmond can withdraw without any sanctions and thumb their noses at it while giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry.
Ofcom can try to regulate TV, radio digital media and the consumers’ experience of telecoms. But how can it complete its tasks as it faces a 28% budget cut, as Richards told the Convention? Methods again, not principles.
I’ve been through the codes of practice, the guidelines for media, in the UK and internationally. They are much the same. The real question is where is the leverage to implement them?
Independence without democracy
People call for independent regulation: yet what is this independence but independence from democratically-controlled bodies. Who voted for Richards, or the other “independent” regulators? The state, by which I mean the politicians, hate to get tangled in this mess as they might be seen to be interfering. So they set up “independent” bodies who, because of their independence, do not have clout.
Breaking the law
Let’s be clear about the basis of the Leveson inquiry before we see any of its recommendations: it is an inquiry into action which broke the criminal and civil law. Both the Telecommunication Act against interception (the criminal law) and the Human Rights Act on privacy (the civil law).
Leveson faces a huge challenge: ensure independence from the state regulating but also create effective methods.
The US Congress is taking ”piracy” of US intellectual property seriously by proposing to attack the financial basis of foreign sites running copyright material without permission. Two acts are in Congress to let media owners force search engines to stop linking to “pirate” sites and stop US advertisers advertising.
Wikipedia offline in protest
The opposition is growing to the acts. The most public so far has been Wikipedia which suspended its English-language site for 24 hours from Tuesday night. Glad my students are not on deadline for their coursework yet.
Even the White House is against the acts, saying they infringe freedom of speech.
Ever since Viacom failed in 2010 in its bid to get damages for copyright infringement from You Tube, now owned by Google, the media owners have been looking for a new weapon to defend their property. They have found it in these proposed acts.
The US writer Clay Shirk yhas made an impressive 13-minute lecture on the motives of the media owners behind the acts.
Murdoch vs Google
A strong supporter of the acts is Rupert Murdoch. He tweeted about Google: “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”
Murdoch does not say how much he is pouring into lobbying to support the acts.
Google responded: “This is just nonsense. Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads … We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day.”
A long battle
The struggle continues between media owners and users that started with the first copyright act in the world in England in 1709.
Top tip of the week on effective business writing
#37
Think about the subject lines on your emails. Will they make anyone want to open them?
See more top tips here and check out our new course on Effective writing.
Writing: a game of two parts
Happy new year!
I’m going back to basics for the first post of 2012.
Whenever you’ve got to write something you’re looking at two interlinked activities:
Thinking
Putting it into words
All too often we skimp on the first part. We think we can just sit down at a keyboard and words will flow magically from our fingertips. I wish!
It’s only when we’ve taken time to engage the brain long enough to decide what we’re trying to say that we can even begin to think about how to say it.
I won’t say it’s my new year’s resolution because I stopped making those years ago, but I will try to keep it in mind.
How about you?
For more advice on effective writing check out our new e-learning course.
Season’s Greetings!
We’re taking a short break.
See you in 2012!
Copyright consultation: get on with it
The UK government has opened up a period of consultation over the reform of copyright. It is picking up the proposals of the Hargreaves report and suggesting changes in:
- Allowing limited personal copying of music etc;
- More open use of data for data mining for non-commercial operations;
- Exceptions from copyright infringement for parody and pastiche;
- Better licensing for “orphaned works” where the copyright owner is unknown; and
- Licensing in sectors to make the use of copyright works easier.
Good summary
The copyright law as it is currently applied is well summarised by the Government’s Copyright Service. And by ContentETC’s IP e-learning and face-to-face courses.
This is all in parallel with the work of the EU and of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). WIPO is working on the issues of libraries and archives. It is also working to help ease copyright for those with sight impairment.
Public domain needs wide definition
In the longer term WIPO is looking at the issue of the public domain. It does not seem to have got far with this, which is a pity. Only when we have a robust definition of the public domain can we see how restrictive copyright really is.
We all have until March 21st 2012 to get our remarks to the UK’s Intellectual Property Office about the proposed UK changes.
Get on with it
It seems such a drawn-out process given the extensive consultation of the Hargreaves report. Why not just get going with the legislation to implement the rather timid recommendations of Hargreaves?
But, as far as it goes, the proposals are worth implementing. More effective would be a solid and wide definition of the public domain for us all to share works in.
Words matter – even more proof
How to put words together in the way that best gets the message across is a subject of consuming interest to writers. We spend hours thinking about the best way to combine them. But few of us, I’m guessing, spend a lot of time thinking about our choice of pronouns.
Well perhaps we should.
The way we use pronouns and other function words – like articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs – reveals a lot about us, according to a fascinating piece in the Harvard Business Review.
Pennebaker believes pronouns offer insights into the writer
James Pennebaker, chair of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us (Bloomsbury Press, 2011), has analysed over 400,000 texts and found that function words actually reveal more about the writer’s psychological state than content words, the words that convey meaning, do.
Pronouns tell us where people focus their attention. If someone uses the pronoun “I,” it’s a sign of self-focus. Say someone asks “What’s the weather outside?” You could answer “It’s hot” or “I think it’s hot.” The “I think” may seem insignificant, but it’s quite meaningful. It shows you’re more focused on yourself. Depressed people use the word “I” much more often than emotionally stable people. People who are lower in status use “I” much more frequently.
That’s interesting enough on its own. What if we combine it with Malcolm Gladwell’s thinking about the unconscious mind and priming in his book Blink? He argues that people take away subconscious messages from the content words.
A simple example would be the use of word boring.You might say “This is far from boring” but the reader may still pick up the negative connotation. Far better to say “This is exciting”. That’s the way I interpret priming and language, anyway.
Put those two strands together and marvel at the power of language. No wonder effective writing takes a lot of thought.
WSJ: the dog that did not bark
I posed a question at a conference on financial journalism this week which still needs answering: Why did not the Wall Street Journal know of the shenanigans in the run up to the crash which started in 2007? It was the dog which did not bark.
Possible answers are:
- Most of the bad stuff was going on in unregulated markets which were hard to report on as they were not publishing public figures;
- The voices warning of danger, and there were ones, were drowned out as the profits of Goldman Sachs and others seemed to rise and rise; and
- It was all too complex for anybody to understand.
WSJ can investigate
After all, the WSJ does investigations. It spent months digging into the Clintons when Bill was in office over the so called Whitewater affair.
And it is not too complex: read the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Report for a clear understanding of it. Yes, it’s interlinked, but key points are easily stated, as the report shows.
WSJ blinded by belief?
My answer is: The WSJ was, is and will be a firm believer in lightly regulated markets which, it thinks, are the most efficient way of allocating capital. Its editors just could not believe that the lightly and unregulated markets in their street where banks were able to do what they wanted could fail in such a manner.
There’s a lesson for us all: don’t let your view of the world get in the way of viewing the world.
Investigative journalism training
I made the same point to a group of journalists when training on investigative journalism last week. Just because you think that you know what the story is, don’t let yourself be blind to a better story coming along.
Kill “churnalism”
It was heartening to see this group of “trade” journalists so keen to develop their investigative skills. Many journalists have given up and succumbed to the “churnalism” so common today. Not this group: and I look forward to the results of their efforts.
I am sure they will be better than the efforts of the WSJ in 2006/7.
Bloggers beware
Blogging is a conversation. But because it is published, it is a conversation with rules. Bloggers ignore them at their peril and the risk of large legal bills!
In the UK in particular, the rules about reputation and defamation are especially stringent. And people who feel their reputations have been damaged by a blog post or on twitter or other social media are increasingly turning to the law for redress.
The number of cases in which a person claimed that their reputation had been damaged by a blog or social media rose to 16 from 7 in the UK in the year that ended May 31, 2011, according to Sweet & Maxwell, the legal information specialists.
Now bloggers are running afoul of the law in the US too. The US has traditionally been much more forgiving when it comes to libel and defamation as applied to journalists. But that’s the catch. A judge in Portland Oregon has ruled that a blogger is not entitled to the same protection as a journalist. It’s a complicated story, but unless she wins her appeal, the blogger involved is looking at paying $2.5 million for defaming the subject of her blog.
The moral of the story: if you’re going to blog, make sure you understand the rules of the game. Find out about libel and other defamations and don’t forget about copyright.
EU probes e-book publishers and Apple
The EU is to formally investigate whether Apple and 5 European publishers are gouging the e-book market. Have they conspired to set prices and so rig the market, is the question.
E-books more expensive than paper
E-books are more expensive than paper editions, much to the surprise of many experts. Manufacture and distribution of paper copies are only 15% of total costs. And in most countries e-books have vat on them whereas paper books do not.
The five publishers are:
- Hachette Livre (owned byLagardère Publishing,France) ;
- Harper Collins (owned by News Corp,USA);
- Simon & Schuster (owned by CBS Corp,USA);
- Penguin (owned by Pearson Group,United Kingdom); and
- Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck (owner of, among others, Macmillan, and based inGermany).
Serious subjects
The top selling e-books tend to be at the more serious end of the market. Even as early as 2009 special interest and scientific e-books totalled £130 million in sales in theUK, according to the British Publishers Association.
E-books will account for 14.2% of the UK book market by 2015, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers. This is up from 0.2% in 2009.
In a survey of potential users of e-books in theUK, PwC found that:
- 21% of readers will not change their behaviour and switch to e-books;
- 50% of readers will use e-books and paper; and
- Only 4% will only use e-books.
Rigged market or low demand?
The low take up, vat and the rather cool attitude to e-books by many readers, rather than any market rigging by publishers and Apple, may account for the high prices of e-books.
