L04 Aggregation Legal

Concepts

Images

Feed Aggregators

As used in this discussion, a “Feed Aggregator” is closest to the traditional conception of a news aggregator, namely, a website that contains material from a number of websites organized into various “feeds,” typically arranged by source, topic, or story. Feed Aggregators often draw their material from a particular type of source, such as news websites or blogs, although some Feed Aggregators will contain content from more than one type of source. Some well known examples are Yahoo! News (and its sister site, My Yahoo!) and Google News. Feed Aggregators generally display the headline of a story, and sometimes the first few lines of the story’s lede, with a link to where the rest of the story appears on the original website. The name of the originating website is often listed, as well.

Specialty Aggregators

For the purposes of this white paper, a “Specialty Aggregator” is a website that collects information from a number of sources on a particular topic or location. Examples of Specialty Aggregators are hyper‐local websites like Everyblock and Outside.In and websites that aggregate information about a particular topic like Techmeme and Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. Like Feed Aggregators, Specialty Aggregators typically display the headline of a story, and occasionally the first few lines of the lede with a link to the rest of the story, along with the name of the website on which the story originally appeared. Unlike Feed Aggregators, which cover many topics, Specialty Aggregators are more limited in focus and typically cover just a few topics or sources.

User‐Curated Aggregators: A “User‐Curated Aggregator” is a website that features user‐submitted links and portions of text taken from a variety of websites. Often, the links on a User‐Curated Aggregator will be culled from a wider variety of sources than most news aggregators, and will often include links to blog posts and multimedia content like YouTube videos, as well as links to more traditional media sources.

Blog Aggregators: Of the four types of news aggregators discussed in this paper, the final category, what we’re calling “Blog Aggregators,” looks the least like a traditional news aggregator. Blog Aggregators are websites that use third‐party content to create a blog about a given topic. The Gawker Media sites are perhaps one of the best known examples of Blog Aggregators, and also illustrate the different forms that the use of third‐party content can take on these sites. One method of using third‐party content on Blog Aggregators is as raw material for blogger‐written content, synthesizing information from a number of sources into a single story (occasionally, but not always, incorporating quotes from the original articles) and linking to the original content in the article, at the end, or both. Elsewhere, a post may consist of a two to three sentence summary of an article from a third‐party source, with a link to the original article. Yet other posts are composed of short excerpts or summaries from a number of articles strung together, all with links back to the original articles. Another popular Blog Aggregator is the Huffington Post, which likewise uses third‐party content in a number of different ways. The Huffington Post website is organized into several sections, the front pages of which typically feature links to a mixture of different types of content, including original articles authored by Huffington Post writers, AP articles hosted on the Huffington Post website, and articles hosted on third‐party websites. In linking to content on third party websites, the Huffington Post sometimes uses the original headline, and other times will use a headline written by Huffington Post editors.

For all of the attention that news aggregators have received, no case in the United States has yet definitively addressed the question of whether their activities are legal. Only a small number of lawsuits have been brought against news aggregators, and all of them have settled before a final decision on the merits.

Before trying to answer the question of the legality of news aggregators under U.S. law, let’s take a closer look at the cases that have been brought to see what arguments both sides of the debate are making.