The Associated Press is suing news-aggregation site Moreover and its parent company VeriSign for copyright infringement for snippeting and linking to its news. This harkens back to the early days of the Internet when news aggregators were routinely legally hassled for linking.

AP Suing Moreover Like It’s 1999

>>> What do you think? Provide your perspective on this lawsuit here.

I founded the first news aggregation site on the Internet back in 1996 called NewsLinx which had the slogan, "All the News On the Web About the Web." NewsLinx is now owned by Alan Meckler’s Jupitermedia Corporation.

I remember getting personal calls and emails from virtually every site I linked to including the Wall Street Journal, Time Warner, L.A. Times and many others. The calls and emails usually started with the question, "Do you have permission to link to our articles?" Old media legal departments were clearly very green with the Internet. My typical response was, "No, we don’t have permission and if you would like us to stop linking and driving traffic to your site just let me know. However, we feel we have every right to link to your articles without permission because the Internet itself is based on the concept of linking."

Much of this law is still not completely settled, but publishers generally rely on the fair use principle that small snippets linking to a story are permissible. Cases like AP vs. Moreover can open a can of worms for the largest news aggregation sites on the Internet such as Google News and The Drudge Report. This likely is the reason that Google signed an agreement with the AP a couple of weeks ago to link to AP stories within Google itself rather than other AP partner sites like CNN. 

What would be of concern to Google, Drudge and many others is a rogue ruling by a not-so-Internet-savvy Federal Judge that would put real restrictions on linking to news. So far, the prevailing standard has been the legal concept of fair use. Hopefully, this case is assigned to a judge who realizes that the Internet is based on links. The use of an article title and short summary has been considered fair use in past cases. However, I am not sure if the use of smaller versions of copyrighted pictures regularly used by Google News and Drudge will withstand this fair use test.

The legal filing itself shows a complete lack of understanding of the Internet in general and online news aggregation in particular:

6. Defendants are also trespassing on AP’s chattel by using search robots or "crawlers" to retrieve information form AP’s computer servers in order to display, archive, cache, store, and/or distribute AP’s proprietary works.

To me item number 6 simply defines a search engine. All search engines violate this standard of copyright and this has been deemed fair use. What the Moreover service does is aggregate certain news including news from AP and provide links for people to get to said news. They don’t link to news that isn’t made publicly available and they don’t provide full copies of articles to clients.

The AP’s lawyers go to great lengths to build up the copyright value of their first sentence in their articles, called "leads." They state, "Leads are so important that journalism schools offer courses dedicated entirely to techniques for creating them." The first sentences are often the only snippet taken as part of news aggregation link sites like Moreover and Google.

It makes you think that if fair use is narrowed to this extent, no article could quote another article. Or perhaps the AP lawyers would agree that you could quote another article as long as you don’t link to that article; thus, a kind of backwards SEO.

The heart of the complaint by AP is their contention that you can’t operate a news aggregation site like Moreover (or Google News,  Topix, Drudge, WebProWire, Digg and Techmeme) as a commercial venture. Unless you have an agreement with AP to carry their stories, apparently, you can’t link to them.

Specifically, AP does not like the marketing approach taken by Moreover because it competes directly with their syndication business model.

36. Defendants vigorously stress the "hot news" aspect of their services. And, as Moreover pronounces in its website-based marketing materials: "For current awareness, news aggregation is far superior to traditional syndication. Why? Increasingly, critical business information appears first, and more often exclusively, on the open Internet. Because Moreover aggregates news already available on the Web, there are no hidden content access charges like those associated with syndicated news services. The result is a fixed, predictable cost structure that delivers a rapid return on investment.

AP’s legal complaint finesses the fact that Moreover does not actually use more than the headline and lead of their articles. They also fail to mention that Moreover provides direct links to AP and to AP partner websites for every article. The complaint states:

41. Thus, Exhibits F – J show that Defendants are simply copying AP’s proprietary material, including the headline and all or a portion of the lead, and delivering it on a real-time basis to their paying subscribers and other users.

The links themselves make it clear to Moreover subscribers that these are not their articles. The links also are a traditional way on the Internet to acknowledge copyright to the publisher of the article. These points are all conveniently left out of the Moreover copyright complaint.

This lawsuit makes the "brilliant" case that:

- You can’t use headlines of articles without permission from copyright holders.

- You can’t use leads or short snippets of articles without permission from copyright holders.

- You can’t run a business that sorts data available to anyone on the Internet like news aggregation sites do.

- You can’t use marketing statements like "hot news" if you link to groups of AP articles.

Basically, you can’t run a news aggregation business that includes links to AP stories because that competes with AP’s paid syndication model, according to AP.

Unfortunately, an AP win here could ultimately subject the entire concept of linking on the Internet to a new legal standard, especially links to news stories and blog posts. If fair use becomes "permission linking" then much of the Internet could be challenged.

The AP seems to think it has a monopoly on high quality content. A legal standard based on this case would mean all linking is subject to approval by the party being linked to.

 >>> Comment on this article here.

 Download the complaint in PDF formate here:
http://www.scribd.com/word/download/386951?extension=pdf