Memorandum submitted by the Newspaper
Society
1. The Newspaper Society represents the
regional newspaper industry.
2. Innovation, brand extension and portfolio
publishing are crucial to Britain's regional press. While focusing
on their core business of provision of local content, regional
publishers are developing not just newspaper titles but also a
range of targeted publications and channels to expand their footprint
and reach increasingly diverse audiences in their regional markets.
3. As well as 1,286 regional and local,
daily and weekly titles, the regional press has over 400 stand-alone
magazines and niche publications, over 600 websites, numerous
radio stations, innovative television stations, and is developing
new services and new ways to engage and interact that build upon
and develop their already traditionally close relationship with
their local communities.
4. Recent years have seen a rapid expansion
by newspaper publishers into new media platforms, including audiovisual
services, the internet and mobile phone messaging services. The
generation and dissemination of high quality information is the
result of considerable investment by publishers in journalism,
innovation using new technology, human resources, management and
time.
5. As publishers diversify into digitised
products, rights-ownership and rights-clearance issues have assumed
increasing importance and complexity; strong protection of copyright
is essential to protect their investment. The employer-ownership
provisions contained in section 11 of the Copyright, Designs &
Patents Act 1988 have been of central importance to newspaper
publishers, together with the other legal protections that newspaper
industry secured to enable newspaper reporting, editing and publication.
The preservation of such strong copyright protection for publishers,
including the legal protection of databases, with effective means
of enforcement is vital under the UK, EU and global intellectual
property regime. Regional newspaper companies must be sure that
their economic investment is underpinned by effective legal protection,
so that they can be confident of their ability to use and disseminate
the works created by them and their employees in any appropriate
way, with the freedom to innovate and develop—in perhaps
as yet unknown ways.
6. It is becoming increasingly incumbent
upon newspaper publishers to protect and promote their commercial
interests against the free exploitation by Google, Yahoo and other
search engines of our industry's editorial and advertising content.
Such "monsters of the internet" are building a business
model—which competes with our own industry—on the
back of newspaper editorial and sales investments, with no direct
financial recognition or recompense for our publications.
7. Publishers have to invest in challenging
any problematic interpretation of copyright, database and brand
infringement. Yet the Government is favouring the "new"
industries without addressing the developing or longstanding problems
of the innovating "traditional" media. For example,
the Government has consulted on whether the content aggregators
and hyper linkers should benefit from changes to the law to provide
beneficial legal certainty, including legal defences that bolster
protection against risks of legal liability, rather than prioritising
the address of publishers' problems and considering improved legal
protection and enforcement mechanisms that would also aid publishers
and content creators, to help them to create, innovate, develop
and promote their services, using new and traditional technological
methods of communication and interaction in whatever way suits
their audience.
8. The Newspaper Society has a number of
concerns over the British Library's policy direction vis-a"-vis
newspapers' archives, online publications and websites and these
have been communicated to the Department for Culture, Media and
Sport. The European Commission's Communication "i2010 Digital
Libraries" focuses on online accessibility, the digitisation
of analogue collections, and preservation and storage. These activities
must only be carried out in a way that is compatible with the
commercial interests and sustainability of the publishing industry.
Society members must retain control over whether or not their
content is made available to third parties, and to protect their
revenue streams. The British Library have made it clear that the
deposit of newspaper websites is on their future agenda; the schedule
appears to have speeded up, despite previous assurances that moves
to achieve this were unlikely to be inaugurated for some years
hence. During its passage through Parliament the Newspaper Society
and other bodies secured changes to the Legal Deposit Libraries
Act 2003 in order to safeguard the publishers' commercial position;
these safeguards must not be undermined.
9. However there is a real need for law
reform to promote freedom of expression over the internet and
in traditional media.
10. There needs to be comprehensive reform
of the laws of libel to accommodate the realities of the new media.
For example, global access to online publications engenders problems
of global liability. The EU seems determined that these are to
be governed by the draft Rome II Regulation on applicable law.
Rather than improve the existing law, new uncertain regimes are
proposed. Yet the united call for a country of origin rule to
apply to defamation and privacy claims from all media and their
pan-European organisations, including the UK media, (backed by
the House of Lords Select Committee) is ignored.
11. In UK law, a "single publication
rule" must be introduced for libel (and contempt) to ensure
that a finite limitation period really does apply, and is the
same for both online and offline publications. It is untenable
that a 19th Century case concerning an aristocrat's dispatch of
his manservant to collect an offending publication from a library
now means in practice that there is indefinite risk of legal action
in respect of a continuously accessible online publication.
12. Legal defences must be updated to accommodate
the interactive environment. The regional newspaper company now
provides the online forum for its local community to engage with
each other yet lacks updated legal defences that promote freedom
of expression. We fear that even the long awaited DCA review of
online libel law reform will only focus on a very narrow area
and largely intends to assist intermediaries, content aggregators
and ISPs instead of the content producers such as regional newspaper
companies.
13. The regional newspaper industry strongly
supported the Government's refusal to introduce special controls
over internet content under the Communications Act 2003, in addition
to the multitude of existing laws that already apply. Freedom
of expression and press freedom must be promoted, not restricted
as a result of the greater opportunities, wider access and diversification
of means for exchange of information, views and opinion that the
new media platforms provide.
14. The Society hopes that the Government
will maintain this stance in its negotiations on EU legislation.
The regional press opposes the EU's proposal to extend the scope
of the television without frontiers directive beyond television
to "new media" audiovisual content and trusts that the
UK Government will vigorously oppose attempts to introduce stricter
statutory, co-regulatory or enforced self-regulatory controls
over editorial and advertising content in the press and its new
media platforms.
15. Extensions of the criminal law intended
to curb "harmful" online content and dissemination also
pose threats to freedom of expression and create particular problems
for news media and those providing current affairs and discussion
forums. For example, the Government may yet try to restore the
Terrorism Bill's proposals for offences of glorification and dissemination
of terrorism and terrorist material, combined with police powers
to order removal of online and other material without sensible
procedures for appeal, review and lawful re-instatement.
16. Finally, the Newspaper Society is concerned
that the Government's attempts to encourage the development of
new media platforms and services should not discriminate against
the traditional media. The Society's submissions on the review
of the BBC Charter has explained its concerns about the BBC's
licence fee funded activities in respect of ultra local television
and local online services or other publicly funded operators or
initiatives. There must be proper controls to avoid adverse market
impact or handicap of its commercial competitors including the
regional press.
24 January 2006
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