The question of what’s “fair use” in terms of aggregators indexing and providing lists of stories from newspapers, for example, on their own pages (Google news is good example) is a thorny one, made ever more urgent by news organizations need to grow revenues online more rapidly to offset print declines. Is Google unfairly profiting from the hard work of news gathering organizations by presenting list of headlines and summaries from those news organizations, along with its own ads on Google News pages? Or is it driving traffic and providing free marketing for the newspaper Web sites? Or sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both? This MediaShift story takes a look at the legal action organizations such as the Associated Press (I sit on the New England Associated Press News Executives Association board of directors) have taken against Google. The piece also provides some history regarding this issue – and it’s interesting to see that it predates the Internet:
“In the early 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court was faced with a case in which the AP sought to protect its news content from a rival news organization that traded on the time difference between the publication of AP stories in East Coast newspapers and the later deadlines for West Coast papers. The rival paid off AP employees to pass on early versions of AP stories destined for East Coast papers, rewrote the stories to avoid a copyright claim, and sold the resulting product to West Coast news outlets, thereby taking advantage of AP’s effort and expenditure in gathering the news.” This led to the recognition of ” a limited, “quasi property” right in news content that was distinct from copyright law.”
Check out the MediaShift piece here.
