No hard feelings Darwin, I've hijacked my fair share as well.
I downloaded and printed the paper and had a quick read-through on my lunch break.
The statement "proprietary facts" is stated so breezily it's as if it was already accepted doctrine that we the consumer just haven't quite
gotten yet.
It appears to me (and I may be wrong) that the hullabaloo boils down to trying to figure a way to support newspapers and make money off the scrapers.
The claim is that news blogs are getting a "free ride" off of major news networks massive investment in human resources (journalists, AKA reporters) and media distribution (magazines, newspapers, television) which is no longer self-supporting due to the static nature of the product vs. the fluid nature of the internet (electronic advertising and "free riders"), which then requires government intervention (AKA bailout, takeover, etc.) to maintain their "necessary service" status.
I can kinda see their point, I mean most folks probably consider news media to be more of a public service than a market-driven commodity.
Besides, without all the major news networks doing their job, where would all the news blogs get their juicy bits?
But fer Pete's sake I have to ask, what's stopping these folks from investing in and leveraging the very technologies they are supposedly threatened by?
Especially given their already privileged position in society and commerce having more than enough presence, influence and resources necessary to do so, they've gotta be able to do better than simply colluding with the government to play 'tax the enemy', right?
Then again, the tinfoil hat society says the stated intent of the discussion is nothing more than a distraction, with the real goal being to create a State media conglomerate for the purpose of controlling dissemination of information.
I'll take the liberty of suggesting that if anybody doesn't understand the, shall we say,
sinister implications of what they are discussing (they make quite a point of "it's only a discussion, not official policy") please download a copy of '1984' by George Orwell and read it (it's public domain in Australia).
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