What’s the law around aggregating news online? A Harvard Law report on the risks and the best practices via @zimbalist.
One explanation for the decline of the traditional media that some, including News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch and Associated Press Chairman Dean Singleton, have seized upon is the rise of the news aggregator. According to this theory, news aggregators from Google News to The Huffington Post are free-riding, reselling and profiting from the factual information gathered by traditional media organizations at great cost. Rupert Murdoch has gone so far as to call Google’s aggregation and display of newspaper headlines and ledes “theft.” As the traditional media are quick to point out, the legality of a business model built around the monetization of third-party content isn’t merely an academic question — it’s big business. Revenues generated from online advertising totaled $23.4 billion in 2008 alone.
Building a business model around monetizing another website’s content isn’t novel, and methods for doing so have been around for almost as long as the Internet has been a commercial platform. Consider the practice of framing, or superimposing ads onto embeded websites. There’s also inline linking, or incorporating content from multiple websites into one single third-party site. These days, it’s news aggregators that are generating a lot of scrutiny. But are they legal?