Against Intellectual Monopoly

discouraging the copying of news stories, most
sites invite you to "e-mail a copy of this story to a friend." In fact, news
is available so freely over the Internet that it is possible to create an entire
newspaper simply by linking to stories written by other people. An example
of such a "newspaper" is the site run by Matt Drudge, which consists almost
entirely of links to stories on other sites. Yet the incentive to gather the news
has not disappeared. According to intellectual monopolists' preaching, this
should be impossible: to report from the Sudan requires the huge cost of
going there in person, but copying that same report is as cheap as it can
possibly get. So, why are highly paid journalists traveling to the Sudan to
get the news?

    The fact is that, prior to the advent of the Internet, the news industry
was already a relatively competitive one, with many hundreds of news
organizations employing reporters to gather news and write stories on the
same subjects. Copyright has never provided a great deal of protection, and
the copying of news stories is endemic to this industry: the enterprising
reporter who manages to get his helicopter over the car chase first is not
rewarded with the exclusive right to fly helicopters over the site. Copyright
protects specific words, but not the news itself - and new reports of the
form "the AP is reporting that the government of Pakistan has just captured
Osama Bin Laden" are perfectly legal and not a violation of copyright at
all. Because the news industry has been thriving, profitable, and highly
competitive for a long while, the advent of the Internet scared off only a few
incompetent fellows.
    Still, everyone wants a monopoly, and the news industry is scarcely
immune to greed. The arrival of innovative technologies and creative competitors drives the temptation to use existing copyright legislation to preserve or gain monopoly power particularly hard to resist. In fact, the impression one gets from a cross-country comparison is that the less competitive
and more inefficient the news industry of a country is, the stronger is the
demand for monopolistic protection from new entrants. Consider the example of Spain, a country where very few publishers, about five, control most
of the national market, with one of them, Grupo Prisa, the grateful darling
of every socialist government since 1982, acting as the undisputed leader.
In 2002, the four largest Spanish publishing companies began lobbying for
the creation of an industry cartel that would mandate a complete monopolization of the news distribution industry. This would be accomplished
through the creation of a national agency, Gedeprensa, owned and managed
by the same publishing companies, and entrusted with the right and duty
to oversee the distribution of news through all kinds of media. News would
be licensed and a "user fee" collected whenever it was "used," something
analogous to the royalties that music monopolies collect whenever a tune is
played in public. According to plans released by the lobbying group, this feecollecting activity would range from the Internet to the photocopied press
clips and news briefs distributed for internal usage in large organizations.
    How the monopolies backing the Gedeprensa initiative planned to monitor and enforce exclusive proprietorship of the news escapes our imagination, but the proposal is a fact. Unfortunately for the would-be monopolists,
on May 12, 2004, the Spanish Tribunal de Defensa de la Competencia firmly
denied the requested authorization to proceed with the Gedeprensa project.
One wishes the Supreme Court of the United States had shown the same understanding of basic economics, and the same concern with preserving
market competition and improving social welfare, when ruling in the Eldred
v. Ashcroft case that a monopoly that lasts forever lasts only for a limited
time. Alas, it did not.23

    How would the news industry operate in the complete absence of copyright? Obviously local newspapers would no longer feel the need to license
stories from the Associated Press and Reuters. Most likely, the big news services would sell first to a few impatient and highly motivated customers, for
whom getting the news an hour earlier than other people is highly valuable.
Among the very impatient customers of Reuters, we might find the Washington Post and the New York Times, and maybe other news replicators, who
then give away the replicas