• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 21, 2010

In what appears to be a shot across the bow to online aggregators, News Corp.'s Dow Jones has sued the Web site Briefing.com for allegedly lifting Dow Jones' articles and headlines.

"Without permission from Dow Jones to do so and without compensating Dow Jones, Briefing.com systematically copies verbatim or nearly verbatim substantial portions of Dow Jones' copyrighted articles ... and distributes them in competition with Dow Jones to Briefing.com subscribers," Dow Jones alleges in the complaint, filed this week in U.S. District Court in New York.

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch has publicly threatened to sue aggregators, search engines and other sites that allegedly "free ride" on journalists' work.

Dow Jones attorney Mark Jackson said Wednesday that Briefing.com was sued because the site engaged in "a blatant and obvious misappropriation of our content."

He added: "This does not mean we won't go after others who misappropriate our content too."

Briefing.com allegedly lifted significant chunks of 107 articles between Jan. 29 and Feb. 12 alone, according to the complaint. "The copying occurred without any authority or permission from Dow Jones and without any journalistic effort on the part of Briefing.com," the lawsuit alleges.

One of the counts against Briefing.com is a fairly straightforward allegation of copyright infringement, based on allegedly reproducing swaths of articles.

But Dow Jones also makes a more controversial allegation of misappropriation of hot news -- that is, its time-sensitive reports.

Courts first allowed lawsuits for misappropriating hot news in the early 1900s, when The Associated Press went after a competing wire service for allegedly rewriting AP stories.

Some media lawyers criticize the doctrine, arguing that orders banning companies from summarizing the news conflicts with free speech principles, which generally allow people to publish information that's already been made public. Critics also question whether the concept of time-sensitive news is dated in the Internet era.

But a few trial judges have held that the concept remains valid. Most recently, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote in New York banned the site TheFlyonthewall.com from publishing summaries of banks' stock recommendations before 10 a.m.

"Fly's core business is its free-riding off the sustained, costly efforts by the firms and other investment institutions to generate equity research that is highly valued by investors," she wrote in an order issued last month. The Fly is appealing that order.