Rights, Exceptions, and the 'Work' of News
18 Pages Posted: 13 Dec 2018
Date Written: November 21, 2018
Abstract
This paper asks whether our understanding of the public goods issues that copyright addresses should extend to the task of facilitating more efficient internalization of investment in verification and authentication of news content. In recent years, we have seen firms entering a new market niche for verifying content that purports to report current events. These efforts sit alongside initiatives by social media platforms themselves to filter “fake news” from their sites. In an information ecosystem where there is plenty of content but a premium on truth and reliability, should copyright norms be more aligned with the work of these new third-party initiated “veracity markets”? That question implicates a larger set of issues related to how we think about incentives as the information ecosystem evolves – and about the continued salience of orthodox copyright norms in an information ecosystem that is no longer defined by scarcity.
Keywords: copyright, news, fake news, exceptions, fair dealing, citizen journalist
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