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.
Newser
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.