Who's going to end up paying: us or The New York Times?

The Times' announcement that it would start charging for its Op-Ed content and columnists starting this September provoked a response from Kos that he would stop linking to the opinion pages, and also that "in this world of endless punditry, everyone is easily replaceable." Hundreds of other bloggers chimed in with similar thoughts.

Putting a barrier to content by subscription certainly dampens the amount of attention that bloggers give to a news outlet (for a rough example, compare on Technorati that there are more than 300,000 links to the reg-req. New York Times and 50,000 for subscription only Wall Street Journal), especially in an online news environment where so much of the content is free.

But let's say that more and more papers move to charging for online access. What will happen next I think is that a blogging culture will predominate where one person with one subscription to a news outlet will take it upon themselves to crib articles of interest on their own blog. Some of them might do it on a systematic, perhaps even automated basis, citing "fair use." One subscriber can give access to everyone. Individuals who want to read the papers that day might instead go to Technorati to read the Times and the other papers.

It's already what I do when I want to find an article from the Wall Street Journal. One outcome of this is that more and more folks will read the Times without ever going to its site. Another is that these readers won't be hit by the ads waiting for them at NYT.com. Yet another is that major news providers decision to withdraw from the free news online arena will give space for new authoritative newsmakers to emerge.

The two ways to prevent systematic cribbing on news sites that I can think of is to make the site just accessible enough for bloggers to be lazy/discouraged to take the trouble to copy and paste content (like Salon does with its just-about-tolerable ad portals) or to make it physically very difficult or inconvenient to pull content off a web page (say in the way that it's sometimes hard to pull text from a .pdf document).

Blogging is to the news industry what open source software has been to Microsoft: a wealth killer. And while there will likely be plenty of coming law suits to protect content and limit the definition of fair use, the ubiquity of web-publishing tools won't be able to stop the tide. Hugh Hewitt mentioned at the PDF conference that he thinks that group blogs are dangerous because of the liability a host might incur when other users crib and post proprietary content. I wonder about that. Perennial cribbers like CommonDreams have been at it for years, with zero lightning struck.

Any serious attempts to prevent bloggers from cribbing content I think would result in some of the largest solidarity protests ever seen: Imagine a case where an individual is sued for posting a New York Times column on their blog; millions of bloggers end up posting the same column on their site.

At the registration part of Kos' blog appears "© 2005. Steal what you want." I think he has it right.

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