The battle of the aggregators and news providers deepened today, with UK service NewsNow.co.uk saying News International had barred it from being able to link to any content on Times Online.
The increasingly bitter confrontation over the right to link to freely available news content threatens to set precedents that fly in the face of the natural development of the Internet and the the World Wide Web where growth thrives on the easy exchange of information in an increasingly connected world.
News International owner Rupert Murdoch has had a real beef with news aggregators — including Google and Microsoft. They are, he says, parasites that steal premium content beyond what would be governed by fair use. NewsNow has been facing a concerted action from the major UK newspapers that want to stop commercial content aggregators linking to their news. Against this back drop are tumbling print newspaper revenues and titles struggling to monetise their content online.
Struan Bartlett, Managing Director and Chairman of NewsNow says his service has been singled out
“It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out.
We note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”
At the end of last year, the UK national newspaper copyright body the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), imposed a scheme that introduced the requirement to obtain permission and pay fees to circulate links to freely available web pages. The scheme has been referred to the Copyright Tribunal. NewsNow stopped offering links to UK newspapers as part of its premium subscription services, but continued to offer links in its free services.
My view is clear on this issue. Yes, online revenue comes from having content, but also, most importantly, generating as much traffic as possible. To use a simple analogy, if a road is blocked off traffic does not drive down to have a look, but instead seeks an alternate route to get to its destination. If newspapers are struggling to build online models that deliver healthly dollops of cash from general news content, the one thing they must do is look for ways to monetise traffic.
For the cynics among you, here is The Times online singing the praises of NewsNow in 2006.
NewsNow is also behind the Right2Link campaign.
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I agree completely with your thesis Andy. The Internet is meant to be explored. Each link takes us to a fresh new destination. Attempts to block linking cannot prevail in the long run, as the ‘Net defies both centralization and control. Thank you for your article.