joegratz.net

I’m liveblogging from Blog Law and Blogging for Lawyers, presented by Law Seminars International.

Rick Danis is a Senior Legal Director at Yahoo! Inc. where he provides legal and business counseling to the Yahoo! Media Group, including the Yahoo! News, Finance, Games, Health, Sports, Tech, Education and Yahooligans sites. He has worked extensively on business and licensing issues concerning the aggregation and distribution of blogs.

Rick Danis:

We’ll cover types of content syndication, legal and business issues, and then examples.

[The same Technorati stats we got a few times yesterday.]

Traditionally, content syndication was distributing content for money. Now, it’s distribution for traffic, money, PR, enthusiasm, etc.

[He defines RSS and describes its benefits.]

The disadvantages of RSS are the lack of a deep business relationship and the lack of direct monetization, and the lack of feedback and control.

You should have terms of use for your RSS feeds. Mention that use of your blog through the RSS feed is for personal, noncommercial uses, with an attribution requirement, reservation of ownership rights, reservation of trademark rights, a prohibition against altering the content, the right to discontinue the feed, and make it subject to the overall ToS.

We’re licensing IN or OUT rights to blog content. This is a lot like traditinal content syndication. There’s a 1-to-1 relationship; you cna negotiate for what you want.

Some example of content we license include Wonkette, Huffington Post, etc.

What are the rights being licensed? Rights to “distribute on the internet”? Rights to distribute in other media? Wireless distribution rights? Future technologies? Translation rights? Worldwide scope? (Restricting it to a specific territory is really tough and unreliable.)

What’s is the goal of the license? Traffic, money, PR, sales, etc.

A blogger might want links back to get traffic — with specific obligations for number and placement of links. A licensee wants compelling content, and may not want to link back to send away traffic.

Money-wise, we could have a license fee, ad revenue share, or minimum payment plus ad revenue share. Licensees may prefer aad revenue share, since there’s no out-of-pocket.

In terms of marketing, the blogger may want promotion and press releases, links driving content to the blog, etc. The licensee may want the blogger to commit to trade show or press aprrearances, or a revenue share on traffic sent back to the blogger’s site (book sales, for example), or placing restrictions on where links go on the blogger’s site.

In terms of owneship, the blogger will want to maintain ownership; if the licensee wants to own it, they may want to just hire the blogger.

In terms of exclusivity, the blogger will want a short term and more value for making it an exclusive deal, and perhaps an obligation to use the content. The scope of exclusivity is negotiable and varies widely — use on the blogger’s own site, in a book, etc.

[He describes the types of Creative Commons licenses.]

There are various ad services, but few people are making much more than the site costs them to host. Ads are easy to set up at little cost. You must comply with program policies, though, which include placement and number of ads, prohibitions on certain kinds of content, and compliance with certain site guidelines.

Blog aggregation sites include Gawker Media, HuffPost, Technorati, BoingBoing, etc. [This seems to mash together lots of different models.]

Other business uses of blogs. We’re hiring a lot of in-house bloggers for specific projects. It can act as a free sample of paid content. In-house bloggers are independent contractors or employees who blog about specific expert subject areas, such as health.

[Talks about Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone.]

Many online companies have incorporated blogs about theirservices. flickr and del.icio.us, for example, have their own blogs.

Old businesses are using blogging and bloggers — GE met with environmental bloggers to build support. Wal-Mart was pushing scoops to bloggers who wrote positive news about them, but it was getting posted without revealing the source.

Yahoo finance columnists have links to Yahoo shopping to buy the columnists’ books.

Hiring bloggers. The independent contractor versus employee issue is important. It’s a question of ownership, as well.

Policies are important, and journalistic ethics are sometimes applicable.

Q: Is posting an RSS feed an implied license to use it in an aggregator like My Yahoo!? A: Yes. Q: What if it’s an unauthorized RSS scrape? A: That’s a tough question.

Q: What about China and Chinese bloggers? A: I don’t work with China; I can’t comment.

Q: What’s the decisionmaking process like in deciding who to license? A: It can happen very quickly. Our business development people make deals when we need deals made.