By: Lucia Moses Database Appropriation Concerns Publishers
When classified ad directors meet for their annual conference in San
Francisco this week, the issue of database appropriation will hover like
a pesky fly that never seems to go away.
Newspapers have battled this problem ever since scammers learned to
photocopy printed ads and circulate them as their own. But now that
papers are putting their classifieds online, it's never been simpler for
upstart Web sites to copy and paste them by the hundreds.
When a Web site lifted ads from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
for example, the trouble started when the site failed to remove them and
people continued to answer obsolete ads, much to the annoyance of the
paper's advertisers, said C. Dean Welch, classified advertising
director. 'Here's someone creating a problem with our clients I had no
control over,' he said, adding that a warning letter from the paper's
lawyers appears to have put a stop to the problem.
There hasn't been much of an uproar over database appropriation, for a
few possible reasons. It may be that no one's lost significant revenue
because of it, and that there's no clear legal remedy in sight.
'This is more of a nuisance, and I don't think anyone's personally
experiencing revenue losses because of it,' said Val Kurapka, classified
advertising manager at The Washington Times and incoming
president of the Newspaper Association of America's Classified
Federation.
The answer may lie in two database protection bills, one sponsored by
Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., the other by Rep. Thomas J. Bliley, R-Va.,
pending in the U.S. House of Representatives. Progress had stalled
because of differences between the two bills, but their authors are
being urged to reconcile the two, supported on both sides by powerful
lobbies.
For now, classified directors seem more concerned with protecting their
$18.6 billion in annual classifieds revenue from online rivals than with
safeguarding their databases.
Speaking of the data-diving, Charlotte Aaron, classified ad manager at
the San Antonio Express-News, said, 'I don't think in this day
and time it's going to be something we can control.'
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