New media wild west

Anyone toiling in the fields of new media, must come to grips with their own sense of fair play (or to use the legal term: fair use) in order to keep toiling.

That's why in all my blogs I always site the actual URL and copy and paste the full story I'm referencing. In my world, I'm just commenting on work someone else has done. I'm not co-opting. And I want to give them full credit and full disclosure, so the point they obviously were trying to make is clear (and separate from mine) so my interpretation or spin becomes icing on the cake.

If YOU want some guidance in fashioning your own sense of fair play, here it is, an annotated study of digital law.

(The url is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/blog/2010/whos-afraid-news-aggregators)

The full story:


Who's Afraid of the News Aggregators?

Posted August 30th, 2010 by Kimberley Isbell
in Aggregation CMLP Fair Use Hot News Misappropriation Journalism
As anyone who has been following the debate regarding the "future of journalism" knows, there have been a lot of ink (and bytes) spilled arguing over the role news aggregators are playing in the "decline" of traditional journalistic models. Rupert Murdoch has labeled the practice of news aggregation by entities like Google News "theft," and a professor from the Wharton Business School recently called on lawmakers to amend the copyright laws to prevent aggregators from posting any portion of news stories for a full 24 hours after their initial publication. Even the FTC has gotten in on the act, listing "Additional Intellectual Property Rights to Support Claims against News Aggregators" as the first policy proposal in the Staff Discussion Draft recently released in connection with its workshop series on "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" (To which Google had a thoughtful reply.)

But for all of the heated rhetoric blaming news aggregators for the decline of journalism, the fall of civilization and male pattern baldness, many are still left asking the question: are news aggregators violating current law?

Today, CMLP releases a white paper entitled "The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices" that attempts to answer that question by examining the hot news misappropriation and copyright infringement claims that are often asserted against aggregators, and to provide news aggregators with some "best practices" for making use of third-party content.

A hearty thanks goes out to the people that helped make this paper possible: Justin Silverman, for invaluable research assistance; David Ardia and Sam Bayard, for reading and critiquing numerous drafts; and the speakers from the "Saving Journalism from Itself? Hot News, Copyright Fair Use and News Aggregation" panel at our spring conference, for helping to frame and crystalize many of the issues.

You can download the report here.

(The URL for that report link is: http://www.citmedialaw.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/news%20aggregation%20white%20paper.pdf)