Digital Home Thoughts: News Aggregation Threatened? I'm Gulping Right Now

"The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to "challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners." Web sites like Google and its specialized Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers' own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising. "They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content," Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. "The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

This is completely off topic, but it's important to anyone that reads this site, or indeed many of the sites out there that follow our posting patterns: quote, link, reaction. I'll be watching the results of this very carefully. Part of me thinks that this is only happening because Google now has very deep pockets, but let's say in a worst-case scenario a judgment is issued that says quoting text and taking an image from another Web page on the 'Net is determined to be illegal...it would radically alter the landscape of the Web.

This reminds of a similar issue back in 2004 where Ziff Davis went after Pocket PC Tools (now defunct) for essentially the same reason. Ziff Davis eventually backed off under public pressure, but it was a bit chilling to see that they didn't grasp that Pocket PC Tools was helping by driving traffic to their articles. Let's hope Google wins this one for all of us little guys as well!