Applying copyrights to facts

Copyright laws aim to protect authors of original material, so that they can earn income for their work. Unless the activities generate revenue, many kinds of research and writing are not sustainable. So copyrights foster the collection and dissemination of facts, theories and commentaries. And copyright laws, to a degree, may protect the very existence of a commercial literary enterprise.

Traditional newspapers are losing readers. And the trend will continue, as more and more people go online for reports and opnions on current events. The costs of paper and ink, of labor for operating and maintaining the presses, of labor for distributing the product, of fuel for delivery, of labor for maintaining the trucks--all of these expenses, and more, are associated with the production and distribution of the hard copy.

So many newspaper businesses are putting their products online. This is very efficient, and it saves money, but online news businesses cannot last for long without reporters and support staff for computer systems, without administrators and business managers, without offices for all of these, and more.

Online publishers are trying to make their businesses profitable. They must do so if their businesses are to survive. More and more, publishers online are charging for access to content, and the public must get used to the idea. Where publishers provide valuable goods, they should be compensated. Without earnings, few publishers can afford to continue their operations.

Plagiarism is common on the Web. It happens at radio stations, too, whenever the staff at a station which does not employ reporters gathers news from stations that do employ reporters and rebroadcasts it. Once released, information--especially news--cannot easily be made to earn money. Plagiarism wherever it occurs is both immoral and illegal, and it ought to be resisted, and whenever it occurs, it ought to be punished. Yet preventing it is often difficult, and obtaining a remedy is often costly.

Moreover, a publisher can only hope to earn income from a portion of the broad audience which the facts will eventually reach. The buyers of magazines often share them with other readers who do not pay for the products. A subscriber to cable TV may pay for a viewing of a sporting event but also invite a large group of friends in to watch the show. Publishers thus derive much less revenue from the sale of their products than they would if everyone who viewed or read them paid for them. So far, there is no practical way to prevent this.

Online publishers are entertaining many ideas for protecting the precious content they collect and deliver to the public, and one of these is the idea of copyrighting facts. This would give the initial buyers or collectors of facts, the reporters and publishers of facts, the exclusive right, for a specific time, to disseminate those facts. For example, were sports scores copyrighted, the only authorized publishers for this information might be the owners of the teams, or the companies that bought the scores from the owners, or reporters at the sporting events who have permission from the owners to collect and transmit the data. The exclusive ownership of this data would probably serve the financial interests of the publisher.

Even so, the point of reporting facts, besides earning money for the publishers and reporters, is providing information to society for its use. And society benefits not only when individuals acquire data but also when individuals, in free communication with others, can share and evaluate and comment upon and reason with those facts.

For the most part, society benefits when factual information flows freely. (There are notable exceptions, for example: military secrets and communications that induce panic or promote illegal activities. This list is not exhaustive, and about any such list, there is always the possibility of debate.) Copyrighting facts would slow the transmission of information in a world that increasingly values speed. In general, restricting the flow of factual information, even by copyright, were such a copyright established in the law, would not produce the greatest good for the society at large.

In any case, copyrighting facts would be impractical. Such a scheme would be unwieldy, and enforcing it would be time-consuming and expensive. But more to the point, copyrighting facts would diminish one of our treasured freedoms: freedom of speech. Thus it would impair one of the greatest advantages and cherished values of living in America. Present copyright laws should be respected and enforced more vigorously, but legislators ought not to extend copyrights to apply to particular facts.