Enforcing Copyright Law Against Bloggers
As noted at Boing Boing, George Washington University Law School professor Daniel J. Solove poses a provocative question: What If Copyright Law Were Strongly Enforced in the Blogosphere? It's an interesting supposition, and Solove makes some good points, but his central analogy is flawed.
Solove suggests that publishers might "initiate a vigorous copyright enforcement strategy, launching a barrage of lawsuits against bloggers as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has done to music file sharers." There's a critical difference between online news publishing and online music distribution: online news publishers, apart from a few notable exceptions like the Wall Street Journal Online, use their content to sell ads while music publishers sell their content directly.
News publishers have a disincentive to sue bloggers because bloggers contribute to their bottom line. Bloggers drive traffic to publishers' sites, thereby contributing to ad revenue. Record companies, on the other hand, have a very hard time seeing any relationship between unpaid song downloads and unit sales. In fact, they assume the opposite, that every pirated song is a legal purchase denied, a fallacy but one that's widely held nonetheless.
But Solove may prove prescient with regards to images. It seems to me that what's likely to happen is that image companies like Corbis will either sue or negotiate with ad service providers like Google to get a cut of AdWords revenue from high traffic blogs that post copyrighted images. Suing individuals would be counter-productive because bloggers just aren't going to pay to get premium photos on their sites.
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