MediaTech Law

If the thinking behind a liberal approach to web content sharing is driving traffic back to your original content source, what happens when the benefits of doing exactly that – i.e. bumping up traffic for potential advertisers – fails to generate the hoped-for commercial return?

Like all advertising, web advertising has always been somewhat more art than science (yet), for better or worse, with accompanying difficulties in translating eyeballs into advertising revenue metrics.  Comes now the collapse of the web advertising market.  What then becomes of the willingness to go along with liberal content “scraping”, excerpting and other copying under “fair use” arguments?

Brian Stelter probed this very question in the NY Times recently.  Stelter interviews, among others, Henry Blodget of Alley Insider and Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, whose publications are among the most aggressive and overt in the practice of integrating others’ content into their writings.  Ms. Huffington states, honestly, that “we excerpt to add value”, which is probably a fair statement, except that Stelter also notes that these sites “highlight [] what they deem to be the most meaningful parts of newspaper articles and TV segments.”