Connie Schultz Advocates for Changes to Copyright Law

There is a column up on the PD website by Connie Schultz in which she argues that the United States copyright law should be changed to protect newspapers. The idea, which she credits to a lawyer from the same law firm that represents the PD and a economics professor from Arkansas, involves prohibiting sites that aggregate news articles from profiting from the aggregation.

The theory is that sites like Newser and The Daily Beast, which link to articles on newspaper sites, are profiting from the aggregation without sharing the revenue with the linked to newspaper sites. Schultz argues that they are basically ripping off the newspapers which produced the original article.

The two men she quotes are proposing some sort of revenue sharing arrangement and a prohibition on aggregation sites linking to stories during the first 24 hours a story is up and running.

Another possibility would be to treat newspaper articles like recorded music. If a radio station plays a record, they have to pay the owner of the rights to the record a fee. They also have to keep records of what they play and when they play it. It is not a perfect system, but it prevents radio stations from making money off the efforts of others.

The problem, of course, is what to do about links to newspaper articles in sites, such as this one, that doesn't generate revenue. If we put a link in one of our posts should we have to pay? On the one hand we are benefiting from the work of others, such as Ms. Schultz, but on the other hand we are not making any money from her work.

In any event, it is a good article and brings up a lot of interesting points. You can go to www.cleveland.com and read the whole article.

Great Connie Schultz Column on Represenative Stephanie Tubbs Jones

Earlier this week Connie Schultz, Pulitizer prize winning columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote a memorial column about the late Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones. It is a great column. Ms. Schultz captured Representative Tubbs Jones' spirit, warmth, and enthusiam for life. Please take the time to read it.

His Lovely Wife to Speak

The latest book by Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Connie Schultz, “And His Lovely Wife: A Memoir of the Woman Behind the Man”, will be in bookstores on June 16.

The book is a compilation of journal entries she made while campaigning across Ohio last fall with her husband, Senator Sherrod Brown. It is written in her signature style and is witty, humorous and full of common sense observations.

She writes; The first time I heard it, I laughed. Oh, come on, I thought. He didn’t just say that.We were in a restaurant in southern Ohio where a hundred or so Democrats and a handful of young campaign workers had gathered to hear my husband, Sherrod Brown, announce for the seventh time in two days why he was running for the United States Senate.
The party chairman of the county stood up at the lectern and in a loud, booming voice, introduced “Congressman Sherrod Brown – and his lovely wife”.
By week 40 of the campaign, I had been introduced that way nearly a hundred times.

Connie Schultz is scheduled to appear in Medina on September 27 to speak and to sign books at the Broadway Auditorium (in the County Administration Building) at an event sponsored by the American Association of University Women. 

—Gloria Brown

The above article ran in the June 2007 issue of Common Sense, Medina County's only Democratic newspaper and is cross-posted at www.medinacountycommonsense.com.

Connie Schultz Column on Condolezza Rice

Connie Shultz wrote a column last week in which she listed women that she admired. She didn't include Secretary of State Rice. Several readers emailed her to ask why she omitted Rice's name. Some speculated that it was because Rice is a Republican. Today Schultz answered these readers with a column about why she didn't include Rice. The reason was Rice's advocacy of the Iraq War as National Security Advisor and her continuing defense of that war as Secretary of State. It is a great column and you can read it by clicking on the link in this entry's title.