The federal government spends more than $10 million each year on media monitoring services that fundamentally undermine the ability of media companies to pay for news reporting.
When the Copyright Agency is signing off on a scheme that allows government departments industrial-scale access to copyrighted material without providing fair compensation, then surely the system has broken down entirely.
Subscribers will have noticed a few changes in the past week as InnovationAus.com went live with a new subscription management system that should make it a lot easier to manage the bulk licencing arrangements that are so important to the sustainability of our journalism.
I wanted to update our readers on the changes, and to give some context around misconceptions about the way copyright works in practice in relation to media monitoring services.
The Copyright Agency is supposed to protect and compensate copyright holders for their work. But this does not happen in a meaningful way.
In fact, the Copyright Agency through its Media Monitoring licencing in many ways acts against the interest of the copyright holders.
In order to protect our work from unfair exploitation, InnovationAus.com has joined a throng of other media companies in withdrawing from the Copyright Agency scheme.
In the case of government agencies, the Copyright Agency scheme acts as a massive disincentive to those agencies paying for subscriptions to cover the cost of what had become unfettered access to our material.
The concern for InnovationAus.com is that these government departments and agencies are led to believe that by entering a commercial relationship with a media monitoring service, that somehow all of their copyright compliance obligations have been covered.
This is not the case.
For example, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) spends about $450,000 annually on media monitoring services through a three-year, $1.3 million contract with service provider Streem.
The Industry department contract is just one of many that Streem holds with the Commonwealth, generating more than $6 million in media monitoring revenue within the federal government alone.
When it became clear that the arrangement was giving full access to our material across the 5,000-staff Industry department – teetering on top of a laughably tiny handful of subscriptions – we knew there was a problem.
DISR is not an outlier here but is emblematic of a cavalier approach to copyright. For the record, InnovationAus.com approached the department with an offer of a modest site-wide licence for all staff, but have been ignored.
All of this makes funding our journalism more difficult.
To our existing, paid subscribers: We love you. We salute you. We thank you for the support that you continue to show us.
And please accept my humble apologies for this tedious, inward-facing post.
But I did want to clear up the common misconception among public servants who think that by paying a media monitoring service that they are compliant with copyright obligations.
No. This is absolutely not correct.
At a time when these are the same people developing the systems for how copyrighted materials will be treated by AI, there is no reason for optimism whatsoever for the future of news and the protection of rights.
We will keep publishing because we think its important. We could not do this without the support of our subscribers. Hopefully we can convince the departments that spend big on media monitoring services but not on paying for subscription licences to the publications that are being monitored is the lawful thing to do.
Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.