More and more articles are being written with debates around the ramifications of reuse and the growth of free syndication. As an FSC study indicated, 75,195 Web sites reused at least one U.S. newspaper article without a license, with 112,000 near-exact unlicensed copies of articles found throughout a 30-day study.

Yet, the topic of content diplomacy looms. What steps must be taken on behalf of publishers to educate consumers about the monetized value of their re-used content?  How can we foster collaboration with syndicators for the sake of a consumer economy?  How do we all allay people’s fear that there is a movement to remove all unlicensed content from the Web?

Michiko KakutanIt’s elaborates on this topic in his article, “Texts Without Contexts,” discussing the impact of digital media for content producers:

“It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace.”

Recently, Felix Cohen wrote an article in the UK-based Guardian Newspaper, highlighting his perspective about “a modern copyright system that focuses on empowering producers, not criminalizing consumers.”

However, as Felix summarizes, the legislative process is lengthy and tiresome. Rather, simplified solutions like Attributor’s content syndication model and the FSC’s Guidelines (pdf) point towards a starting point for a broader discussion of content syndication, with solutions benefiting publishers, syndicators, aggregators and consumers of content.

Felix discusses the need for a new, non-legislative copyright system that rewards creative people, creates an array of new business models and supports the modernization of syndication processes, all while emphasizing the need to empower producers rather than criminalize consumers.

We will further discuss this and related issues in additional posts to come.

Listed below are a few key findings from the research – you can download a full .pdf report of the research here.

• During a 30-day period (October 15 – November 15, 2009), 75,195 Web sites reused at least one U.S. newspaper article without a license.
• On these sites, 112,000 near-exact unlicensed copies of articles were found.
• Among the top 1,000 sites reusing the most articles, blogs represent less than 10 percent of the total.
• In addition to the 112,000 full article copies (defined as more than 80 percent of the original article and more than 125 words reused), an additional 163,173 excerpts were found (defined as less than 80 percent of original article and more than 125 words).
• Ad networks from Google and Yahoo dominate the unlicensed monetization of U.S. newspaper content. Google represents 53 percent of the total monetization with Yahoo accounting for 19 percent.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is open to publishers of all sizes, and we invite you to join in support of publishers receiving their fair share of ad revenue wherever their content appears across the Web.

UPDATE:   These results exclude any articles found on Google News.