Guest comment: The Right to Link? Publishers against the internet
- Added:
- Feb 11, 2010
The announcements that Mirror Group and News International have both banned NewsNow – the online news aggregator site – from indexing any of their news stories, have prompted an angry debate on the rights to link to universally accessible information, as well as raising questions as to Murdoch’s business methods, says Harvey Sarjant, Managing Partner at Addvantage Media.
In the run up to the TimesOnline paywall later this year, Murdoch has been on the war path publically denouncing news aggregators and search engines that link to news content online. As such his decision to ban NewsNow shouldn’t really come as a surprise. However, singling out one independent news aggregator but not touching a major player such as Google seems odd (despite threatening, in November, to ban Google from linking to News International news).
NewsNow has reacted to the bans by launching their ‘Right2Link’ campaign. They argue that news publishers don’t have the exclusive rights to their articles and headlines once they are publically available online and that indexing a news article does not equate to the reproduction of the news outlets’ ‘intellectual property.’
Equating indexing with stealing content does seem harsh. In a world of links, blogs and twitter where real time information can be spread by all at speed, News International and Mirror Group have revealed themselves to be somewhat old fashioned in their perceptions of the online landscape. The nature of the internet means that news suppliers no longer have a monopoly over news distribution or news generation and acts like this reveal a misunderstanding of the nature of sharing online information.
Earlier this month an amendment was proposed to the Digital Economy Bill by the Conservative Lord Lucas, which would result in search engines being exempt from any liability to copyright infringement for the results that they provide. The bill would regard any publically available websites as automatically granting permission for search engines to link, copy or syndicate their content, by virtue of the fact that the websites are already universally accessible.
This raises the question of what exactly constitutes a search engine. What is the difference between news indexed on NewsNow and that featured in a Google search? I would argued that, rather than being a threat, NewsNow and other news aggregators actually provide a ‘search service’ for news publishers. NewsNow directs a significant amount of traffic to news sites like TimesOnline and mirror.co.uk, resultantly driving up revenue for the publishers .
This is particularly relevant with News International’s current marketing push with The Times, which is presumably based on the assumption that attracting readers and driving traffic to the website will ultimately result in paying subscribers when the paywall is implemented. It therefore seems like a very odd move to cut off a site which can assist in this goal – and free of charge.
Being a niche website, News Now has a dedicated and engaged flow of readers who are attracted to the site as providing a ‘one-stop’ digest for their daily news – they use the site to select stories of interest and then click through to the newspaper websites. By deleting their presence from news aggregator sites, news publishers are allowing their competitors to flourish as NewsNow’s traffic of engaged and dedicated online readers is directed towards these other sites. If News International and Mirror Group are really serious about increasing traffic then it strikes me that news aggregators, as traffic driving channels, should be collaborated with, rather than suppressed.
By Harvey Sarjant
Managing Partner at Addvantage Media
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