When the popular New York business blog Silicon Alley Insider quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column in mid-February, the editor added a caveat at the end: “We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you.”
The editor added “in advance” because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. (The Wall Street Journal has an exclusive content partnership in India with Mint.) The excerpt was published with the assumption that it would be permitted under the “fair use” statute of Copyright Law.
New controversy: Some publishers had complained when Google News added advertising to its search results.
Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of websites that regurgitate their news and information.
But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work—a practice sometimes called scraping—are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.
With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.
“A lot of news organizations are saying, ‘We’re not willing to accept the tiny fraction of a penny that we get from the page views that these links are sending in,’” said Joshua Benton, the director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. “They think they need to defend their turf more aggressively.”
Copyright infringement lawsuits directed at bloggers and other online publishers seem to be on the rise. David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, said his colleagues kept track of 16 such suits in 2007. In 2004 and 2005, it monitored three such suits each year. And newspapers sometimes send cease-and-desist orders to sites that they believe have crossed the line.
Some publishers complained last week when Google News, a site that aggregates headlines from thousands of news sources, added advertising to its search results.
Last December, GateHouse Media sued The New York Times Co., alleging copyright infringement after local sites associated with The Boston Globe, a Times Co. newspaper, copied the headlines and lead sentences of GateHouse’s newspaper articles. The case was settled out of court in January.
In another case, which is pending, the Associated Press sued the online news distributor All Headline News last year, saying that it had improperly copied AP articles.