AP and 28 News Groups To Collect Fees From Aggregators
jjp9999 writes "The Associated Press is launching the NewsRight project to make aggregators pay for content. Some of the top names in the news industry are currently on board, including New York Times Co. and Washington Post Co, and they're currently negotiating with Gannett, Tribune, Cox and News Corp. The project will license original news from the media companies and collect royalties from aggregators. The use of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits are already on the agenda. NewsRight's first salesperson starts work this week."
This is covered under Fair Use as one of the provision is reporting the news. Most RSS only provides a small snippet, enough to cover the basics of the story and is not subject to copyright.
The problem is that it's well within the content providers ability to block legitimate sites from aggregating their content (see: robots.txt). They don't want to do that. Instead they want the benifit, _and_ want those sites to pay them.
Well I think its time they collect. AP, NYT and news agencies have people on the ground and they pay them to provide info. We as a free society (not the US only, all of occident), need this kind of setup to get information. Even if its slanted, at least the payment is for info itself, not for the slant.
If we leave this market untouched, then all we are going to hear about, is whatever advertisers are willing to pay for.... think about it.
NO SIG
Well I think its time they collect. AP, NYT and news agencies have people on the ground and they pay them to provide info. We as a free society (not the US only, all of occident), need this kind of setup to get information. Even if its slanted, at least the payment is for info itself, not for the slant.
If you want to pay to support these guys, then get a subscription. Aggregators are just providing summaries with links back to the their websites with the full story. I really want Google to just delist all these guys from news.google.com in response. "Well, we're not going to pay you guys, but if you feel that it's unfair for us to grab this content from you, that's fine, we'll stop." Then they can immediately watch their page hits fall by 40% at least.
If anything, the news websites should pay aggregators to please include them.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.