An interesting ruling comes from Great Britain that could soon also affect Italy. News aggregation sites must pay the publishers who provide the content of the pages. As is known, case law predominates in disputes, and the British experience could be a good precedent for publishers in Italy as well.
The British High Court of Justice has upheld the claims for damages by some publishers for every link with accompanying news (ed. even just a few lines) present on aggregation sites and similar. The material produced by publishers, even online, is protected by copyright.
News aggregators and the raped journalism
Some call it link journalism but I believe no one with even a bit of common sense would associate the word journalism with a site that merely aggregates news. The first to take news and lay it out simulating the work of an editor was Google News. Behind Google News there is no journalist at work but only software that, based on criteria that have nothing to do with the world of journalism, sets the priorities. Following what Google News has been doing for years (publishers choose whether or not to be part of Google News) and which has caused considerable debate among publishers worldwide, the Web has recently been “polluted” by news aggregators that take news from every site. Often behind news aggregation sites there are also corporations and not just tech geeks as the common imagination would suggest, exploiting some Google bugs to climb positions in organic search (when will Google realize that these sites hide link exchanges?). In Italy, Google’s SERPs are polluted by these inventions, children of unscrupulous software programmers who, in exchange for a few crumbs of revenue (often from Google AdSense), do not comply with state laws and the work of others.
Google News news aggregators are illegal
In most cases, publishers ignore what is happening. When requesting the removal of their news from these containers, they often hear back that the news comes from Google News, so there is nothing to claim. Law made, trick found? Not at all! The news aggregated from Google News and included on sites with even just a line of advertising (for profit) are illegal. Google states this. So?Owners of news aggregation sites or copied and pasted content must be reported for violation of copyright laws.
Aggregators and copyright law
In Italy, the law on copyright (22 April 1941, no. 633) is in force, and is violated daily even by sites whose ownership is linked to companies. Tech geek sites, needless to emphasize, are the worst examples as in most cases they rely on two methods to “steal” others’ content (all content is regulated by copyright law unless otherwise specifically indicated by the publisher):copy and paste o content aggregation.
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