Bangkok Post Bans Thaivisa From Using Its Content

[Jeii3000]

OK, I'm going to ask the question that I hope other people are thinking:

What is an RSS feed?

Have a look right here

[desi]

Odd that one can find no mention of the "Society for Online News Providers" anywhere online, other than this thread.

I noticed that too.

Something is not right here, but as no one has spoken up about the fair use laws in Thailand (are they the same as the US?), perhaps ask these guys?

Thailawforum.com

[AlanL1275]

This is simple. I will no longer be buying, nor reading the Bangkok Post any longer.

:-)

[george]

This Thai law says its no copyright on news articles (section 7.1):

http://www.thailawforum.com/database1/copyright2.html

[McPhong]

Nicely written!

[yumidesign]

Never mind, they will come around eventually. There are plenty of formerly powerful news organizations in the West also trying to figure out how to claw back the omnipotent control over news and information they once had. Happily, the boat has already sailed and the mass general public are all on board. Bon voyage

too true its nice to see the likes of the murdoch clan trying to extort money by charging for on line news........ but far too late.... as you say the boat has truely

left port without them

[andy1308]

Odd that one can find no mention of the "Society for Online News Providers" anywhere online, other than this thread.

I noticed that too.

Something is not right here, but as no one has spoken up about the fair use laws in Thailand (are they the same as the US?), perhaps ask these guys?

Thailawforum.com

Fair use would not include cutting-and-pasting an entire story word-for-word for commercial gain.

The Society for Online News Providers is new. It was formed last week and does include Nation Multimedia, along with around a dozen (at the moment) Thai language publishers.

[StrandedBusinessPerson]

Odd that one can find no mention of the "Society for Online News Providers" anywhere online, other than this thread.

Good one! It's probably forming now...The Bugle has a good explanation why...

http://www.bangkokbugle.com/2009/10/bangko...-copyright.html

My guess is that this is a baby step to microcharging for content.

Edited October 2, 2009 by StrandedBusinessPerson

[Farma]

Odd that one can find no mention of the "Society for Online News Providers" anywhere online, other than this thread.

There was an article in The Nation on the 25th of September mentioning the formation of the Online News Producers Club. Maybe the same "Society"?

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/09/25...ss_30113046.php

[angiud]

I didn't buy Bangkok Post for a long time, and in the meantime I appreciated the Nation covering during the Black Songkran, the best e most updated source of informations during that awful days.

So, thumb up for the Nation

(also politically speaking)

[andy1308]

George mentions the "news of the day" exemption in the Thailand Law Forum link. From what I understand that essentially means headline news. There is no copyright on headline news. I am not a lawyer but have been involved in legal publishing issues over the past 15+ years.

[thykeeper]

In general I support that "Society for Online News Providers" - they should get their royalties for reposting their content, which is not free to produce.

That's what Bangkok Post should try to negotiate - share of the revenue for reading their articles on TV or anywhere else. But if they chose to forbid reposting and even quoting - it's their choice, I just hope they eventually realize that it's not the way to move forward. They might hurt themselves, but, on the other hand - no one here, on TV, would be happy if they go bust, or if the quality of their reporting deteriorates - that's not what we want to see in Thailand.

For now the ban is a ban. Hope they still allow links. That was not clear from George's announcement.

Are they ok with posting links to their articles?

I don't think anyone can claim ownership of a link, it's public domain. That would be like trying to ban people from speaking your name or gaining access to your address after you clearly posted it on your front door.

[chrisdom]

Bangkok Post is reporting that Blah blah blah with a link to the article is not using their content. Is that acceptable? (In the same way you might highlight something on BBC or CNN without actually seeing the content.)

For me, their content is produced at their expense and with their expertise and clearly they want to drive people to it some way or another (not remove the need to, as reproducing all of the article does).

It might be different if you had to pay to get the article (but that will come!).

Must admit that I am becoming less and less enamored with BK Post as a subscriber.

Today's front page ignores the regional tragedies of earthquakes and tsunami - surely huge news that should be covered properly and professionally and doesn't get any coverage until page 6.

I can understand where they are coming from but this is ill-thought through and creates misunderstanding.

[LivinLOS]

You've got to be kidding. ThaiVisa is probably the reason they get half their traffic. Way to shoot yourself in the foot BKK Post!

I don't think the Post can "ban" quoting small bits of articles used in discussion or criticism, its fair use. However, I suspect the real issue is the cut-and-paste of full articles or overly large sections thereof, which is (lets face it) a breach of copyright.

Exactly the same as a local news source that was a previous advertiser.. They simply wanted to not have full cut and pastes without a linkback..

And as they create the content and ThaiVisa would then repost that without backlinks and collect the advertising revenue on someone elses copyrighted content I fully understand that.

[desi]

Odd that one can find no mention of the "Society for Online News Providers" anywhere online, other than this thread.

I noticed that too.

Something is not right here, but as no one has spoken up about the fair use laws in Thailand (are they the same as the US?), perhaps ask these guys?

Thailawforum.com

Fair use would not include cutting-and-pasting an entire story word-for-word for commercial gain.

The Society for Online News Providers is new. It was formed last week and does include Nation Multimedia, along with around a dozen (at the moment) Thai language publishers.

I've always thought that TV went OTT when posting entire stories (or even a huge chunk). But TV are saying that we can't even quote from the Bangkok Post.

Members quoting or posting Bangkok Post content will be warned by our moderating team, and the post will be deleted without warning.

That is the part that makes no sense to me. From what I understand, there is no legal stand against quoting.

[baht&sold]

Odd that one can find no mention of the "Society for Online News Providers" anywhere online, other than this thread.

There was an article in The Nation on the 25th of September mentioning the formation of the Online News Producers Club. Maybe the same "Society"?

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2009/09/25...ss_30113046.php

"A joint declaration forming the club was signed by 13 major online news-content providers: ASTV Manager, Thai Rath Online, Daily News Online, Matichon, Post Publishing, the Nation Multimedia Group, Siam Sport, INN Online, Thansettakij Online, Dara Daily Online, Nawnha Online, Siam Rath Online and Thai Post Online."

[adam1]

Yes, it's a tad strange......it maybe that this is an overreaction to some technicality, and that sanity and reasonableness will prevail when the dust settles.

I must agree though that the boat has definitely sailed, and free-circulating information is now the currency du jour, thank god. The Bangkok Post is such a propaganda-ridden and sanitised dinosaur. I do enjoy the funnies and some Outlook articles tho', and the weather..........

[richard10365]

haha so funny...This should make the qualty of news reporting higher on Thaivisa. More truthful too. Good riddence to the Bangkok Post.

I stopped reading Bangkok Post because of the wild healdlines they would use to sell papers. Apparently that is not a requirement for SONP.

[Crushdepth]

Section 7.

The followings are not deemed copyright works by virtue of this Act:

(1) news of the day and facts having the character of mere information which is not a work in literary, scientific or artistic domain;

I think this refers to the basic *factual information* of what happened. You can't claim copyright over a news event just by being the first to report it. However, that doesn't mean people can copy your story about it - just that they are free to write their own.

[PaulHamon]

So surely for ThiaVisa to keep up with the rest of the world you should implement RSS within posts.

Bit of a no brainer really.

i'm very sure this is not hard, and commonly takes place on other forums.

[PaulDee]

OK, I'm going to ask the question that I hope other people are thinking:

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed, according to Wikipedia (IF we still are permitted to quote Wikipedia?):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed",^[3] or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

[CheapCharliesAsia]

OK, I'm going to ask the question that I hope other people are thinking:

What is an RSS feed?

Really Simple Syndication

Takes blogs and resends the content in a very simple HTML like format.

[andy1308]

Members quoting or posting Bangkok Post content will be warned by our moderating team, and the post will be deleted without warning.

That is the part that makes no sense to me. From what I understand, there is no legal stand against quoting.

Correct. Quoting is fine. Saying something like ".. there's a story in The Bangkok Post today that says XXX .. " is legally fine. Look at the recent Forbes Asia: Thailand's Richest People report. That was quoted everywhere but was not reproduced in its entirety.

[mixed]

What about stories from notthenation.com, as they still banned?

[bdenner]

Easy:- Write

'It has been reported by a reliable source in Bangkok ---- such and such has happened' Don't use quotes.

The readers will know where to find the article if they wish to.

[hansnl]

Newspapers verywhere in the world are having quite a battle on their hands becasue of the internet. Advertisement income is in decline, number of subscribers is going down, in short, the written news on paper is in decline. Most newspapers are diverting into internet, and try to define the borders there, try to generate income & profit, quite a logical thing to do. Guess BP is doing the same. Maybe the era of the paper newspaper is coming to it's end.

[desi]

To me, it is clear (and fair) that the Bangkok Post is demanding that TV stop posting entire articles.

What is not clear to me is who is demanding that TV members stop merely quoting from the Bangkok Post articles.

Is it TV? Or is it the Bangkok Post?

[AFHH]

Bangkok Post bans Thaivisa from using its content

Used to buy BKK Post every day. I'll switch to The Nation from today on...

[spode]

What is an RSS feed?

It's a kind of technology that sends you links to the latest news articles. You can see the headline and perhaps one sentence explaining what it is about.

It is a way of distrbuting web site content via an XML file which can be read by computer programs and processed using standardized tools. Basically it will include the title of a web post, a link to the web post, and date/time stamp of the web post, and optionally some or all of the content of the web post. That content can include just about everything you see on the web page, if they set it up that way - images, sound files, flash video links, and yes - advertisements as well.

Put another way:

RSS is an XML protocol designed for "syndicating and aggregating" Web content, such as headlines, what's new lists, etc.

"RSS [...] provides an open method of syndicating and aggregating Web content. Using RSS files, you can create a data feed that supplies headlines, links, and article summaries from your Web site. Users can have constantly updated content from web sites delivered to them via a news aggregator, a piece of software specifically tailored to receive these types of feeds."

-from the Utah State Library's RSS Workshop

However, what the end-user actually sees depends more on what tools they use to read/view the content of the RSS feed, rather than the feed content itself. For example, a feed reader might just show the title and first line of the article by default, even if more is available - the user usually needs to configure it to display more, and the advettisements may be much less noticeable.

Examples:

1 - http://library.ust.hk/info/notes/notesrss.xml - A simple feed for our newsletter, with just title, link, and first sentence or so.

2 - http://library.ust.hk/blog/feed/ - A more complex feed to the full text of our blog posts.

If you go to those in your web browser, they will look very different from a specialized rss feed program.

Hope this help.

-Spode

[alstaxi]

OK, I'm going to ask the question that I hope other people are thinking:

What is an RSS feed?

What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.