Aggregation, fair use and the newspaper blues

Today, a fellow journalist e-mailed me this link to a New York Times article on the fair use of online content. He’s of the opinion that sites that aggregate and excerpt material are essentially stealing. Well …

While the Times article doesn’t break any new ground on this topic — at least not for those who’ve been following it on a regular basis — it does provide a decent general overview for newcomers.

However, one of its assertions doesn’t quite tell the whole story:

With the Web’s advertising engine stalling just as newspapers are under pressure, some publishers are second-guessing their liberal attitude toward free content.

It’s true that some are advocating paid-content as a way to increase revenues. But it’s misleading to suggest that a downturn in online advertising is the main catalyst of this movement, especially when talking about newspapers with online sites. Print ads account for about 90 percent of their revenues.

The newspaper industry is in a mess right now because of a depressed economy,  a failure to innovate and being over-leveraged. Profit margins have been declining. If newspapers aren’t shuttering their operations, they’re gutting staff.

The irony is that those newspapers so desperate to find financial health are the ones that need the kinds of free aggregation they abhor. Having said that, I don’t mean to suggest there aren’t legitimate issues of fairness at play here.

GateHouse Media had sued The New York Times Co. for scraping headlines and lede graphs from its community websites. That case was settled, with the Times agreeing it would cease the practice. And I’m none too pleased when I find my posts have been scraped in their entirety (or close to it) and placed into sites that have little to no original content.

My blog is filled with excerpts from stories. But as a good netizen, I always make a point of linking back to the source material, and I never excerpt more than a small fraction of articles. On occasion, I will explicitly encourage readers to visit the original story, so they will know how valuable it is beyond the passages I’ve provided. I’m also grateful when other sites link to my blog posts, a practice that has been occurring with greater frequency on journalism-related blogs and Twitter. In the link economy, the only way I can make a name for myself and build traffic is by getting other people to link to my posts.

Does my friend have a good point? I think so. When so much material from a source is aggregated or excerpted that it renders the original content irrelevant to a reader, that’s at least an ethical problem and perhaps a legal one. But there are technological steps sites can take to prevent their content from being scraped. Those who then limit their exposure on the Web will have only themselves to blame when they become the latest to shut down operations. And they can join those who thought that aggregating everything under the sun is a way to turn a profit.