These days the newspaper business is like an endless self-help seminar, with chinstrokers tossing around theoretical therapies while journalists cast about for a life preserver.

The latest in the latter category is Connie Schultz’s column in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer (via Romnesko) calling for 24-hour copyright protection of newspaper reports. The problem, Schultz writes, is that Internet sites like Daily Beast and Newser are “free riding” on expensive-to-gather newspaper content.

[P]arasitic aggregators reprint or rewrite newspaper stories, making the originator redundant and drawing ad revenue away from newspapers at rates the publishers can’t match. The inevitable consequence: diminished revenue and staff cuts.

For a solution, Schultz turns to the brothers Marburger – David and Daniel – a First Amendment lawyer and an economics professor, respectively. Their recommendation is this:

[A] change in federal law that would allow originators of news to exploit the commercial value of their product. Ideally, news originators’ stories would be available only on their Web sites for the first 24 hours.

This is a certified Bad Idea for one simple reason: You pretty much never want to invite the federal government into your house. As Chris Brown follows Rhianna, the feds will eventually stretch out in your living room and ask for a beer and a sandwich.

Firing back from the new-media side of the Imaginot Line, Buzz Machine mechanic Jeff Jarvis  – perhaps upset by the “parasitic aggregator” thing – started by focusing on Schultz herself.

First note well that Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown as she calls on her newspapers and employer (my former employer, Advance Publications) and fellow columnists to influence Congress to remake copyright. She should be registered as a lobbyist. No joke.

Actually, is to laugh. But more substantively, after several derogatory comments about David Marburger, Jarvis added this:

Schultz and the Marbergers [sic] complain about what they call the “free-riding” of aggregators, et al. But they simply don’t understand the economics of the internet. It’s the newspapers that are free-riding, getting the benefit of links.

Seems to me the relationship is symbiotic, but what do I know? Anyway, Schultz promptly responded to Jarvis in the comments section:

I have no beef with Google News, for example, which posts a headline and a link to the original story. My objection is to aggregators who post such significant rewrites or summaries that readers to their sites lose any interest in going to the original stories. Nor am I arguing that the copyright exists in perpetuity. I suggested a 24-hour window – and this is up for debate, of course – to allow the originators of the coverage to exploit the full commercial value of their product. Hardly a dangerous proposition.

Whereupon Jarvis responded with his own comment:

You do not deal with the substance of my argument at all. News when it is news is fact and fact in discussion is not subject to the protection you seek to bring to it. Links to newspapers’ news benefit the newspapers.

Over all, I tend to agree with Jarvis – although for different reasons – that the Marburger/Schultz approach is counterproductive. But at the risk of being flame-broiled by the Buzz Machine machine, I gotta ask: Why does Jeff Jarvis feel the need to be so relentlessly unpleasant when he does his new-media boogaloo?

Perhaps because of that, Jarvis suffers in some circles from the rap that he revels in the misfortune of old-media types just because they haven’t drunk his flavor of Kool-Aid.

Jarvis is right about a lot of things, although his confidence that new media can replace the in-depth and investigative content of old media like newspapers is, I think, wildly optimistic.

Regardless, this much is true: Schadenfreude is bad luck in any language. And in any medium.