The legal position of news aggregators

In the past week, new life has been blown into the recurring discussion about news aggregators’ copyright infringements, such as news.yahoo.com, news.google.com and many others. As mentioned in an earlier article, the Associated Press news agency and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp Inc. and the Wall Street Journal have called these aggregators copyright thieves and want to police the internet for infringements. However, these services usually only show a title and the first couple of sentences of an article, before sending the user to the source website.

According to the older media companies, news aggregators disseminate newspapers’ content, without having any regard for the role of the producer and encourage the public to consider news as free information. These aggregators often make a handsome profit, such as Googles’ reported $13 million daily.

Aggregators, on the other hand, claim to be a newspapers’ friend, because they generate a lot of traffic and channel this to the newspapers’ online ventures. This traffic can easily be monetised by offering advertisements (Google recommends its’ Adsense service!). In a world without news aggregators, they claim, users would find it much harder to find the news the seek and they would be less likely to discover new newspapers’ online ventures. Also, newspapers can often opt-out of the aggregators service. This is certainly something else than opting in, but it seems to develop into a norm on the internet. News aggregators claim they do not violate fair use, because they only show a fraction of the text to which they link.

Two years ago, the Belgian court has ruled that news.google.be is not a news aggregator or search-engine, but a news portal. Therefore, the service was no longer allowed to link to the claimants’ news articles. The court consulted a specialist, who concluded that services cache the articles (which means storing for a long period), so users can still read them while the newspapers might have deleted these articles. Therefore, newspapers lose control of their content and advertising revenue, because the Google could bypass these. According to the court, Google wrongly takes the newspapers’ share of advertising revenue.

The Dutch court has ruled in a similar case that kranten.com, a news aggregator, does not violate copyright, because it does not duplicate the articles and its references can be considered as a citation.

In a contemplative article, Roy Greenslade discusses the recent accusations of Google and similar services. He concludes that these are often used to secure a stronger position in possible distribution of licensing of content deals with the internet giants.