News Websites Are Like Movies: Everybody Steals From Everybody

By Matthew Belloni

In one of our favorite scenes from "Swingers," Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn and crew debate whether Tarantino's slow-motion walking shots in "Reservior Dogs" are cribbed from Scorsese. "Everybody steals from everybody," one of the guys says. "That's movies."

These days that's also pretty true of online news sources. Today we noticed the Huffington Post was accused of over-cutting-and-pasting reviews from the Chicago Reader and other publications. Even the NY Times Co., parent of the Grey Lady and the Boston Globe, was sued this week for copyright infringement by an online media company called GateHouse that claims the Globe's new community Web sites use material from GateHouse without permission.

These cases beg the $64,000 question of online media: how much excerpting is too much? That's a fair use issue, of course, and without any clear guidelines, it's anyone's guess where the line would be drawn on how much sites the Huffington Post can take.

But, at least in our view, there should be a line. And, increasingly, there doesn't seem to be one. Kevin Allman, the New Orleans-based editor of Gambit Weekly, frames the issue nicely (while taking a potshot at the liberal-leaning Arianna Huffington):

In other words: professional newsgathering organizations have paid professional writers to do professional work, and then Arianna comes in, creates links to their creations, and sells ads on her own page. How progressive

The more interesting question is what role the law is going to play in the migration of the news business from print to digital. Traditional notions of copyright infringement and the so-called "hot news" misappropriation tort that protects hard-fought information are going the way of the big-city newspaper--that is to say, they're being killed by the Internet, replaced by a wild-west (and, some would argue, appropriately competitive) mentality that rewards piggy-backing rather and presentation than actual content creation. So while the Huffington Post and other bare-boned aggregators thrive, reporting organizations like newspapers go down the tubes.    

That's not a novel observation. We just wonder whether the law will end up impacting this trend. At this point, it's safe to say it hasn't. An infringement lawsuit against some of the most egregious copiers won't make much of a difference. A wholesale revision of the Copyright Act to reflect the reality of online media might. But that would require lawmakers to care about the future of media. We think Congress is probably too busy reading the Huffington Post.