Content Matters

Today's New York Times featured a story on what is considered Fair Use on the web.
Specifically, they focused on news organizations pushing back on services that aggregate their content.

This is not a new argument; since the dawn of the web there has been a struggle over what constitutes fair use. For most publishers, I think that the definition is as follows:
- when they're getting and converting lots of traffic, that's fair use
- When an aggregator shows up above them in the SERP that's going beyond fair use.

The most interesting recent example is the New York Times itself. A few months ago, GateHouse Media sued the New York Times for sourcing headlines and snippets for use on its Boston.com site. Weeks later, the NYT legal department sent a cease and desist letter to Newser for using its logo along with a headline, snippet and link.

So, what constitutes fair use? I'll leave the technical definition to the lawyers and the courts. But, here's the approach that we took with our new Alacra Pulse application and I think it's a good starting point:

As an aggregator, Alacra follows the approach (originally stated by Dave Winer) that the more we send people away, the more they will come back. As curators, we select relevant content (through automated and manual processes), then provide a headline, a snippet and a link back to the underlying content. With Pulse, as with Google, we give the user enough information to decide whether to click on a link, but not enough information to answer their question without clicking through. Publishers get to monetize the traffic through advertising (or whatever method they use). It's an approach that works well for users, for us and for the publishers.

So, what would I consider not to be fair use? It's pretty easy to recognize when sites are misusing content. If a site provides the full text of my feed so there is no reason for a user to click through to my site, that's a sign. If there's no link back to my site or the link is hard to find, that's a no-brainer.

The slowdown in the online advertising market is causing publishers to rethink their business models. For many, their first instinct is to reduce access and limit syndication. While its debatable whether this approach might provide some short-term benefit, I have no doubt that those publishers who make their content less accessible to the market will, in the long run, lose out.