The Associated Press is suing news-aggregation site aggregators were routinely legally hassled for linking.
AP Suing Moreover Like It's 1999
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I founded the first news aggregation site on the Internet back in 1996 called NewsLinx which had the slogan, "All the News On the Web About the Web." Meckler's
Much of this law is still not completely settled, but publishers generally rely on the fair use principle that small snippets linking to a story are permissible. Cases like AP vs. Moreover can open a can of worms for the largest news aggregation sites on the Internet such as Google News and The Drudge Report. This likely is the reason that Google signed an agreement with the AP a couple of weeks ago to link to AP stories within Google itself rather than other AP partner sites like CNN. What would be of concern to Google, Drudge and many others is a rogue ruling by a not-so-Internet-savvy Federal Judge that would put real restrictions on linking to news. So far, the prevailing standard has been the legal concept of fair use. Hopefully, this case is assigned to a judge who realizes that the Internet is based on links. The use of an article title and short summary has been considered fair use in past cases. However, I am not sure if the use of smaller versions of copyrighted pictures regularly used by Google News and Drudge will withstand this fair use test. The legal filing itself shows a complete lack of understanding of the Internet in general and online news aggregation in particular: To me item number 6 simply defines a search engine. All search engines violate this standard of copyright and this has been deemed fair use. What the Moreover service does is aggregate certain news including news from AP and provide links for people to get to said news. They don't link to news that isn't made publicly available and they don't provide full copies of articles to clients. The "Leads are so important that journalism schools offer courses dedicated entirely to techniques for creating them." The first sentences are often the only snippet taken as part of news aggregation link sites like Moreover and Google. It makes you think that if fair use is narrowed to this extent, no article could quote another article. Or perhaps the AP lawyers would agree that you could quote another article as long as you don't link to that article; thus, a kind of backwards Google News
AP's chattel by using search robots or "crawlers" to retrieve information form AP's proprietary works.
The links themselves make it clear to Moreover subscribers that these are not their articles. The links also are a traditional way on the Internet to acknowledge copyright to the publisher of the article. These points are all conveniently left out of the Moreover copyright complaint.
This lawsuit makes the "brilliant" case that:
- You can't use headlines of articles without permission from copyright holders.
- You can't use leads or short snippets of articles without permission from copyright holders.
- You can't run a business that sorts data available to anyone on the Internet like news aggregation sites do.
- You can't use marketing statements like "hot news" if you link to groups of AP articles.
Basically, you can't run a news aggregation business that includes links to AP stories because that competes with
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