A fact of life for content aggregators is that publishers will always feel that aggregators are making too much money off "their content". After all, aren't aggregators simply leeches, who suck in content, add little value and siphon off profits that would rightly go to the publishers? Well, that's what you might think, if you only hear the publisher's side of things.
The fact that the aggregator invests in building state-of-the-art technology, developing an audience and integrating disparate sources of information, well that's not really adding value. Similarly unimportant, I'd guess, is the fact that effective aggregators often find their sales opportunities come from meeting the requirements of clients which the underlying publishers are unwilling or unable to deliver.
Of course, these arguments have been around since the earliest days of digital media. But they tend to pick up steam during economic downturns and times of great change. And with the structural challenges currently facing the news industry, it's little surprise that news publishers are turning to news aggregators for revenue.
This spring, the Newspaper Licensing Agency ("NLA"), which represents UK national newspapers, launched a new initiative aimed at news aggregators. The NLA, in an effort to capture licensing fees from aggregators, has demanded that press clippings agencies must pay such fees to NLA members. The NLA is initially focusing on media monitoring services - aggregators focused on the professional market. The NLA seeks to get these aggregators to pay a license fee to its publishers; in addition, they want the aggregators' clients to pay a per-user license fee in order to access the content. Details of their proposed offering are published on the NLA site. (link ).
Today, a handful of aggregators, including Meltwater, Updatum and others, responded to the NLA plan with an open letter, calling the NLA plan an attempt to "tax the Internet". In their response, the aggregators state their claim based upon "fair use" principals. Specifically, they respond that the mere receipt of a hyperlink by an End User is not an act which gives the Publishers any rights in English copyright law. The act of clicking on a hyperlink is similarly not an act which copyright law entitles Publishers to restrict.
I'm not qualified to provide a legal interpretation over the doctrine of fair use. More importantly, I don't think that the courts will ultimately decide the fate of the newspaper industry. That will be decided by the customer.
Customers will demand access to news in whatever tools and applications they choose to use. A publisher's refusing to allow users to access their content on a specific platform or a specific device will be self-defeating. If I want to locate an article via an aggregator alert, an iPhone app or via a Google search, that should be my choice as the user.
Should Apple give me a share of iPhone sales, simply because a user chooses to read my content via an iPhone RSS app? Of course not. And asking the aggregators to share revenues back with the publishers in return for indexing their content makes no sense either. I am sympathetic to the plight of the news industry. The structural changes in the way users consume news has killed their old business model and there's not an obvious one to replace it. But the answer is not going to be found in trying to extract additional fees from technology companies and customers.
Publishers have an easy option today - if they don't want to participate in the "link economy" they can easily opt out. Simply use a
But publishers wanting it both ways - to get traffic from those indexers they deem beneficial (Google) while restricting those they deem harmful - will find themselves walking a slippery slope.
