News scraping levy proposals criticised

2009-07-15

Proposals to introduce a levy for scraping online news articles for publication elsewhere have come under fire from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

In an article for PR Week blog, president of the institute Kevin Taylor criticised the proposals by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA).

Fees were originally levied on news agencies that reproduced content published in print newspapers and other publications, claiming that potential sales were lost when the relevant pieces of articles were redistributed.

He suggests that the NLA's attempt to bring the distribution of online news links under the remit of copyright law is "absolute nonsense".

Mr Taylor points out that under the NLA plans it is okay to recommend a link verbally, but not to send the scraped news item links in an email or by some other means.

He also points out that Google, which aggregates thousands of news stories daily on its Google News service, would be exempt from the levy. He suggests that its inclusion could result in an even larger drop in web traffic to the sites, because Google may drop the aggregation service altogether.

Data scraping was recently the subject of a legal dispute between social networking site Facebook and social network data aggregator Power.com, after Facebook sued the firm over the use of the programme by its members.