News Corp. executives made headlines in the last few days by complaining that online aggregators like Google News and Techmeme are "parasites" that poach their content.
But these executives
conveniently ignore the fact that many, many publishers, including those with ties to mainstream media -- including, in fact, itself -- aggregate content. What is the Fox-owned site RottenTomatoes.com if not an aggregator?
That's not to say that RottenTomatoes violates copyright law. It probably doesn't -- and for much the same
reasons that Google News and Techmeme don't.
Like other aggregation sites, RottenTomatoes collects articles about the same topic in one place -- in this case. film reviews. The site publishes,
at most, a few sentences from each review and then links back to the original. It also has the "Tomatoemeter," which measures the proportion of positive reviews. A movie that met with near-universal
acclaim, like "Slumdog Millionaire," scores 94% -- while the less-well-reviewed "Twilight" came in at 49%. The site proved so successful that the founders sold it to IGN for an estimated $10 million
in 2004. The following year, Fox Interactive purchased IGN.
For movie fans, the benefits of a site like Rotten Tomatoe are obvious. If you want to read dozens of reviews, it's a lot easier to
start at that site than to visit each individual newspaper's home page and navigate to the movie section.
Newspapers can argue that the site costs them some ad revenue -- and perhaps it does.
After all, people who find reviews via an aggregator bypass the newspapers' home pages, which means the paper loses an opportunity to serve impressions.
On other hand, would a reader in New
York City have ever thought to visit, say, The Salt Lake Tribune, to read Sean Means' pan of "I Love You, Man," had Rotten Tomatoes not excerpted from it?