MOSCOW, July 29 (RIA Novosti) - Global media outlets are increasingly coming under threat from pirate news sites that use original news content without permission, a panel of Russian and U.S. analysts and media representatives said on Wednesday.
Speaking during a Moscow-Washington video linkup hosted by RIA Novosti, U.S. media law expert David Marburger said copying news, which is less expensive than producing original material, could "kill" the producers of original news, and result in mass redundancies among journalists.
Alexei Goreslavsky, head of online projects at the Russian news agency Interfax, said: "There are a number of websites that pay for re-publishing stories from news agencies and compensate for this, but this is nothing like the money that agencies spend on producing the news."
Daniel Marburger, professor of economics at Arkansas State University, said news pirate sites have very low prices for advertising on their websites, which causes further revenue losses for media that produce original news.
RIA Novosti Deputy Director General Valery Levchenko said agencies experience "financial and non-financial losses" from the activities of media pirates when news items are copied without a reference to the original sources.
The chairman of the .RU internet domain coordination center, Mikhail Yakushev, said that both international and national intellectual property laws fail to protect news copyrights.
"It is clear that this issue should be addressed at the international level," he said.
Yelena Voinikanis, secretary of Russia's parliamentary commission on information policy, technology and communications, said that an amendment should be made to the law on media, to include the notion of "online periodical media." Their inclusion would allow them to "fall under the statues of the law, which demands an obligatory reference to the original source of information."
