Newspaper Associations Want Their Copyrights Revisited

Some newspaper industry leaders feel that copyright law needs to be reworked in order to protect the original content of the papers from news aggregators all over the WWW. Jason Klein is the head of the National Newspaper Network, a partnership with the Newspaper Association of America, which is comprised of companies like the The New York Times, Hearst, Tribune, MediaNews Group, Gannett, Advance and others. Klein voiced their concerns by saying,
"Part of the challenge around investment in quality, original investigative journalism is that it gets ripped off so quickly without attribution...Google picks it up and profits from it. Other entities rewrite stories very quickly. And all the copyright laws were written in an era before the internet emerged and this was a real trend. I'm not an intellectual property attorney but it certainly seems to me that this is a very good time to revisit the copyright protection that newspapers get for original journalism in this era."
While it's easy to understand the frustration of the already troubled newspapers and the constant linking and rehashing of their original content, there seems to be a big obstacle in how to rework these laws, or whether to change them at all. There is controversy from both sides. Said Klein of the highly contested debate,
"Look, it's certainly a delicate topic because who wants to invite more government regulation in any realm?" he added. "But I think there's a growing chorus saying it's time to reevaluate this." Read more from this article.