A New Contract for the Press: Copyright, Public Domain Journalism, and Self-Governance in a Digital Age

Many scholars argue that digital technologies are creating unprecedented opportunities for democratic expression, but fear that the networked public sphere is threatened by overly broad intellectual property rights. Focusing on journalism, we argue that this literature too narrowly emphasizes legal and technical restrictions on the fair use of cultural goods, and that more attention needs to be paid to whether expression in public spheres is inclusive, diverse, and of sufficient quality to meet the needs of democratic publics. Drawing on the underlying principle of copyright-as a public subsidy to promote and protect access to social expression-and positive interpretations of the First Amendment, we propose a two-tiered, content-neutral, opt-in system of state-funded incentives for journalism. Our first tier reverses the mechanism of copyright and subsidizes journalistic content produced for the public domain. Drawing on the "public journalism" tradition, we define a second tier of state-support for journalistic producers engaging in practices-transparency, accountability, dialogue, reliability, and collaboration-that can increase the quality of content. We conclude by suggesting a preliminary institutional model for administering these state incentives.