I must say though, whatever the rights and wrongs, I’m using NewsNow a lot less since the Sun and the Mirror stopped their football coverage going up online. So their tactic at least may be working.
Why should the onus be on the newspapers to find a way for Mr Bartlett’s business model to work? As I understand it, he’s the one refusing to share the spoils.
Their is certainly nothing illegal/immoral/unsocial about stopping an aggregator crawling your website. It’s your decision.
Mr Bartlett can tend to his own problems but what the newspapers have been saying seems to be tru: Without the newspapers, Mr Bartlett’s website is nothing.
Without Mr Bartlett’s website? Well, who would care, apart from his bank manager?

@Robert Andrews: Your questions are very interesting. I would say:

1. Copyright is a monopoly right granting control over the act of substantial copying, from which UK law carves out a number of “fair dealing” exceptions, within the parameters of which, it is perfectly legal to copy.

2. One of these exceptions includes the act of transient copying which, subject to certain conditions (which we believe we fulfill), is permitted. Without this exception, routers and proxy webservers could not transmit copies of web pages across the Internet.

3. Reproduction of headlines does not (we believe) amount to substantial copying. Without freedom to copy insubstantial parts of a work, any quote or citation of another’s work would require permission, and scientific research, review and comment would be impossible.

4. NewsNow works by making a transient copy of an article, in order to run algorithms on it, and then destroys the copy.

5. Given our activities fall entirely within the exceptions to copyright provided under UK law, we don’t see how they can reasonably be categorised as stealing.

Clearly there are people expressing vehement opposition to aggregators and search engines. They are right that producing news and content using traditional models can be a costly business. But it does not - cannot - follow that permission or payment should be required to link to and quote publicly available sources. That would undermine the very basis on which news and content businesses themselves operate. Another solution must be found.

I agree with Tom Sharp, except I believe there is something that all of us have missed, so far. This isn’t about advertisers. It’s about governments. It isn’t about money. It’s about power.

I used to work on The Times and the Sunday Times, and so I know where Mr Murdoch is coming from. He has always lost money on The Times … but he thinks it’s worth taking the hit as being owner of the paper serves him in other ways. Despite diluting its standards as a paper of record (Murdoch’s first act on moving to Wapping was to replace all the journos that went on strike with Daily Mail writers), the title, The Times, still has some kind of subconscious kudos which gives him clout in the global corridors of the power. Maybe not so much here, but if you’re India and you tell someone you work for The Times, they practically fall down in full pranaam at your feet.

I think it is plain to see that Mr Murdoch’s main aim is not sell newspapers or to persuade advertisers to buy space, but for The Times to give him legitimacy as a world stage power broker, thus giving his satellite and other extensive business interest free rein across the world.  If people can get their news without buying The Times, he loses that power base.

I remember once being at a Sunday Times Christmas party, and I was talking with Mr Murdoch. He told me that he had invited the prime minister, but was wondering if she would show because there was some sort of national crisis going on at the time (I forget which one) and the House was having to sit late to sort it out. Anyway, not five minutes later did not only Mrs Thatcher walk through the door, but she had the whole cabinet behind her —  including poor old Willie Whitelaw wobbling on two sticks They all lined up to be received and they all but kissed his ring.

Mr Murdoch stands to lose that power base and thus his global influence through the work of news aggregators. For instance, I may be fairly typical customer of NewsNow. This is because I stopped taking any form of news into my house a long time ago, determined to take control of the narrative of my own life. But for my forum, Ishtar’s Gate, I need archaeological and anthropological news. So NewsNow is perfect for me. I can pick and mix solely the stories I need without being affected by Mr Murdoch and his chums giving me the stories they want me to hear about and around which they insist I should mould the whole philosophy of my life.

That is the power that Murdoch is losing … when he can no longer tell customers like me what to do and what to think. And so his blocking NewsNow from accessing TimesOnline stories is just the very thin end of a long and powerful wedge, and we must push back very hard against it.

I don’t know the ins and outs of the arguments involved in the case, but what I do know is that time and again I’ve read articles on various football blogs, only to then see that content reproduced in national newspapers a day or 2 later. Is that acceptable?

News International might well not lose a significant amount of traffic (and advertising revenue) as a result of stopping Newsnow linking to their pages, but I know at least one less hit they’ve been getting since they were taken off the site and I’ll wager I’m not alone.

Speaking personally, I would never search for articles on The Sun or The Mirror websites, or The Times for that matter, but whenever I saw some sensationalist headline on Newsnow, I would check it out cause it was only a click away. I’m glad that they are no longer listed, as I feel that bit more liberated and free as a result of not reading the dross they churn out (or copy).

I have no sympathy for any of the tabloids going out of business and the sooner it happens the better. Maybe then people in this country won’t be so easily lead to believe whatever agenda they’re peddle at that particular time. The Mail, The Express, The Mirror, The Times (since Murdoch took over) and The Sun are a disgusting blight on this country and care about nothing more than making money. I won’t include The Sport or The Star in that cause they’re just comics. Also, I might not agree with the views of some of the broadsheets, but at least they tend to just stick to reporting news.

“The Sun says….”? Who on Earth do they think they are?

Struan what you doing is not fair. access to content does not include the “right” to steal other people’s intellectual property and benefit from it (ie - make money.)

THAT is what Murdock and the Mirror are putting the lid on. Brick and mortar (tree and ink) newspapers are dying away because of the Internet. Part of the reason they are dying is they have not been able to come up with an economic architecture that allows them to profit from the work of the people they employ to produce intellectual property. IE - they haven’t been successful in getting people to PAY for reading their on-line newspaper, and they haven’t been able to get advertisers to pay for the creation of information that is stolen by aggregator websites and published by them.

The aggregator websites are profitable. They sell advertising that is viewed by people attracted to their websites by content that cost them nothing to produce. They really are stealing the content from other companies that are in the business of producing content and hoping to profit from it. Even if you redirect your traffic back to the originating website, this traffic is negligible and certainly wouldn’t even pay for the electricity it takes to run the CPU cycles of your “systematic” abuse.

Obviously if you steal your content, your cost of operation is much lower than a website that is paying people to produce content. It’s hard to compete against theft.

Murdock is not talking “links”.. he is talking about content, and that’s what he has several times threatened to cut off. Theft of content he has paid to have created. It’s intellectual property rights that are at risk here - and for some reason a lot of people on the Interwebz seem to think all information should be free. If it was free - then there would be no incentive to produce or pay for the production of information, and the Internet would sufffer as a result. As a clue - Murdock is entitled to guard and cut off access for any content he might produce, and personally - I think he has been overly patient in not doing so.

For the conspiracy nutcases - the only conspiracy I see here is the encouragement of the “free the Internet” thinking by large aggregators like Facebook, Google and Yahoo - their false outrage and claims of the death of the Internet are widely overblown when they’re really just bitching because they might have to fairly pay for some of the content they make money off.

As I understand it, the papers’ concern is that aggregators effectively have to make a “copy” of a story in order to perform the processing and categorisation on it that can prove so valuable to alerts clients - even if no “copy” is published to third parties, essentially a copy is made, even if destroyed…

This calls up some quite existential and semantic questions ie. should a copyright holder claim infringement if the third party is not republishing an article but is merely providing an auxilliary service, providing additional value?

Struan, is that the way NewsNow works (temporarily copying the article in order to run algorithms on it, then destroy it), or do you simply aggregate feeds?

@Simpleton:

No, we’re not licensing, because what we’re doing is fair dealing - the same fair dealing newspapers themselves rely on, that the law carves out from what are otherwise monopoly rights granted to content producers. Newspapers don’t pay a fee either when they sell newspapers that contain quotes from and links to other sources. NewsNow simply does it more systematically than many. But not more than any search engine, or indeed link aggregation services run by e.g. News International (see e.g. Techdirt: http://bit.ly/2ZqPmh).

We don’t accept the claim that referring someone to a website using a quote and a link is the same as “selling their content”. We haven’t seen a proper legal case made for this claim. That’s why we see this as attacking fair use and undermining the basis on which the Internet operates. And the idea that newspapers have received nothing in return is wrong. NewsNow, and other search engines, have contributed significantly to the newspapers’ audience figures over the ten years we’ve been running.

Incidentally, our bespoke search services are not our main revenue stream by a long shot.

Thanks for promoting the Right2Link campaign. I’m no TV anchorman, but the arguments made in the video speak for themselves.

P.S. It’s not hard to work out who I work for - what about you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg7n0_0XDD8

thank you Simpleton - that Right2Link video is hilarious. I have just pissed myself. It’s like Chris Morris has just bought an internet firm.

@Gormenghast: You’re missing the point. NewsNow - run by Struan Bartlett (posting above, though not disclosing himself as such) has never paid the newspaper industry a penny for licencing their content, despite it being the sole basis for their main (subscription) revenue streams.

@Struan Bartlett: You’ve been selling their content for ten years without paying a penny to them. I think it’s perfectly possible this is in reaction to that. Your protestations of innocence are almost as bizarre as your “right to link” video, available on a youtube near you. Very amusing viewing.

This development cannot be in response to NewsNow’s subscription services. Since December 2009, NewsNow stopped providing paid-for services that include links to the Mirror’s website.

NewsNow charge my company a significant amount each month for our media cuttings. I don’t understand why the newspapers are at war with them if they are getting a copyright fee from them? Surely it’s in their interest to let NewsNow get on with it and provide them with an extra revenue source. Something is better than nothing.

Good for them. NewsNow like to pretend they’re just an aggregator, but what the papers are really objecting to is their subscription service where they charge people for links to paper’s content. In newspaper terms it’s called a clipping service and businesses pay for the right. Same should apply online.