Scraping the news: A potential problem?

2009-10-14

News is something that the majority of people read or take in through some format on a daily basis. There are many opinions, however, on how information should be paid for and who has the right to display it and where. In this digital age, websites taking, or perhaps scraping news has come under the spotlight.

At the recent World Media Summit in Beijing, the News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch said that search engines and other websites should now have to pay for news reports they currently take for free.

Mr Murdoch told delegates at the event: "The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph."

Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley was also present at the summit. He asserted that crowd-sourcing web services like Wikipedia and Facebook are now preferred by online users looking for breaking news. He said that such sites are displacing those of traditional news publishers and that content creators should act quickly and "decisively" to take back control of their content.

He claimed that those producing the copy have not been quick enough to react to "the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission", such as those screen scraping news from other websites perhaps.

Mr Curley claimed that content creators will no longer put up with "the disconnect between people who devote themselves - at great human and economic cost - to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it".

Talking about how much news aggregators could be affected if Murdoch's hope of them having to pay for content comes true, Alan Boyce, editor-in-chief at Adfero, commented: "The devil is entirely in the detail of the charging scheme he opts for. There are plenty of subscription-only sites still listed in Google News and other aggregators. If News Corp publications withdraw from news aggregators and no one else follows suit, they will probably be cutting their noses off to spite their faces."

However, Mr Boyce pointed out that recent research from the AOP suggests over two-thirds (70 per cent) of publishers are now considering charging schemes.

He said it will be difficult for news publications to wrestle back breaking stories from the crowd-sourcing websites showing it. During the Iranian elections, Mr Boyce continued, and the Mumbai terrorist attacks, mainstream media relied on people based in those areas using Twitter for their information. Expert analysis is not required for breaking news, he stated.

On top of wanting to see aggregators and other websites pay for news, Mr Murdoch had previously revealed his desire to charge consumers for looking at news from one of his company's sites. Mr Boyce pointed to comments of the chief executive of Google Eric Schmidt, who said there are too many free sources on the internet for the withdrawal of a mainstream media cartel to have a significant impact on people's expectations and behaviour.

So it appears paying for news is an issue that will stick around for some time yet. This may be something that eventually becomes a problem for those screen scraping or taking news stories from other sites to benefit themselves. Mr Murdoch and co may be moving in on them in the near future.