Newser To The Wrap: 'We Don't Owe You Squat'

In an escalation of a dispute between two online publishers, the entertainment site TheWrap.com has demanded that Michael Wolff's aggregation service, Newser.com, stop summarizing TheWrap.com articles.

"Newser is not following industry best practices, is intentionally misleading consumers/users at the expense of The Wrap and at the expense of other unnamed sources, and has effectually demonstrated no intention to allow consumers/users to logically and easily ascertain the source of Newser articles," a lawyer for The Wrap wrote on Wednesday in a letter to Newser CEO Patrick Spain.

Sharon Waxman, founder of The Wrap, alleges that Newser doesn't credit and link to her site prominently enough. "If you are aggregating content -- and you are basically taking content that somebody spent the money to go out and report -- at least have the good manners to follow Internet etiquette," she says. "Either send us traffic or give us money."

She estimates that Newser has sent The Wrap a total of only 1,600 visitors in the last 14 months. By contrast, she estimates that the aggregator Huffington Post has sent her site at least "hundreds of thousands" of visitors in that time.

Michael WolfeNewser founder Michael Wolff says he has no intention of complying with The Wrap's demands. "We don't owe them squat," he says. "We will not change our practices in any way."

He also says that Newser includes links to all original sources, adding that sometimes those links appear to the right-hand side of articles as opposed to being embedded in the text.

The dust-up began late last month, after Newser picked up a story from The Wrap about Sony blocking Beyonce's YouTube channel.

Waxman said in an April 1 blog post that Newser originally didn't credit her or link to the site. Upon further investigation, she learned of Newser's source grid for The Wrap, which displays photos and very brief summaries of more than a dozen stories from her publication.

She complained in her blog post that the site linked to Newser rewrites rather than to The Wrap. "One click gets you to the 'Wrap' page, another click gets you to the summary, then a third click to the one Wrap link -- but no, not yet, first they served you AN AD! Four clicks to get to TheWrap.com, whose content it is, if you close out the ad and can wait that long."

The Wrap said in its cease-and-desist letter that it intends to start registering its articles with the U.S. Copyright Office, which would allow the site to sue for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement if its copyright is violated.

But The Wrap didn't go so far as to accuse Newser of copyright infringement. In fact, the entertainment site indicated that it doesn't consider summaries to infringe on copyright, provided no passages are lifted word-for-word. "While underlying facts are not protectable, The Wrap's original expression of those facts is protectable," the letter states.

While many Web sites provide links when they either summarize another publisher's articles or excerpt snippets from pieces, it's not clear that doing so is legally required.

What's more, linking to original sources won't necessarily protect aggregators from lawsuits for allegedly infringing copyright or for misappropriating another publisher's "hot news" or time-sensitive scoops. In late 2008, Gatehouse Media sued Boston.com for allegedly scraping headlines and first sentences of Gatehouse articles, even though the Boston.com articles all linked back to Gatehouse sites. That case was settled before a judge decided the legal issues.

 

2 comments about "Newser To The Wrap: 'We Don't Owe You Squat'".
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  1. John Jainschigg from World2Worlds, Inc., April 12, 2010 at 10:03 a.m.

    Go Sharon Waxman! Shut 'em down.

    The Wrap's position is entirely justified in this matter. They report the stories, and Newser steals them. Look at the layouts on Newser's site. Sure, there's a tiny little link there, off to the right. But really ... that's not even the point, is it? The point is: if these stories are:

    - aggregated in their entirety by Newser, and ...
    - aggregated en masse, and then arranged in browsable panes, thus enabling a reader of Newser to have a fairly 'deep' and longitudinal experience with The Wrap right on Newser's site ...

    ... why would anyone in their right mind visit The Wrap as a result of a Newser transaction?

    You know what would fix this? Browsers that cared. It would be perfectly simple to adjust CMSs and syndication frameworks to include embedded provenance information in XML feeds and other places. Google, I suspect, would LOVE this, since it would eliminate any real ambiguity about sourcing and ranking -- you wrote it, you make that assertion, you're #1 in search rankings. The end.

    And in short order, it would become a de-facto part of internet culture that - if you republish syndicated stuff _without_ the provenance tags - accelerated lawsuits follow and large sums of money move from your pockets to the pockets of legitimate creators.

    Meanwhile, it would also be perfectly simple for browsers to parse the provenance stuff out of pages, and throw up highly-visible popup links to drive users out of ripoff contexts and back to source websites. Important to note that this works for Google as well as everybody else -- if being #1 in the search rankings on a story means a culturally- and legally-mandated, highly-visible representation of your brand in the Google search page (e.g., REPORTED ORIGINALLY BY THE NEW YORK TIMES) as opposed to potential readers being forced to parse your brand identity out of a truncated raw url, (e.g., http://nyc.nytimes.com/articles/jsessionid=asdfasdfafasdf .......), I kinda think it's gonna do better things for the Times than being first in a list of indistinguishable garble, garble, garble 310,220 links long, where it's just as easy to click #5 as #1, particularly if some genius at #5 (the site that's stealing your stuff) wrote a catchier headline than you for your story.

  2. Jonathan Mirow from BroadbandVideo, Inc., April 12, 2010 at 11:53 a.m.

    When you make content available for free on the web - what do you think is going to happen? If other people can use it for their benefit, they will. Waxman is being simplistic - the web has about as much etiquette as a drunken sailor on shore leave. Is she just figuring this out?

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