NewsRight Won’t ‘Rule Out’ Infringement Litigation, Chief Says
News licensing startup NewsRight doesn’t follow the business model of Righthaven, the struggling law group that sued bloggers for reposting articles, but litigation isn’t out of the question, President David Westin told us. The organization, launched in the summer as the Associated Press’s News Licensing Group, last week said it signed up 29 news and information partners and investors, including The New York Times Co. and Hearst, covering more than 800 websites whose content it has authority to license (CD Jan 6 p12). Focused on digital text for the moment, NewsRight is in “very preliminary” talks with organizations interested in having licensed video and still images from NewsRight’s partners, Westin said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Westin said he hadn’t heard of Righthaven until listening to a recent radio segment about the group, whose assets are being sold to pay its legal costs and judgments for filing copyright infringement suits without owning the full copyrights. “Our reason for being is to create a new marketplace” for news content, said Westin, a former president of ABC News. NewsRight’s first target for licensing talks is “closed-Web aggregators” that excerpt news and sell subscription services to enterprise users in a particular subject, he said. NewsRight is limiting itself to the U.S. to start. Licensing video and still images and expanding internationally is “decidedly step two,” he said.
"Do I rule out the possibility of any litigation? Of course not,” Westin said. Reposting or excerpting of news content around the Web “varies widely,” with some usages lawful and others “outrageous,” said Westin, who is a lawyer: Many usages are “in between” and “reasonable lawyers can differ” over their propriety. Litigation is time consuming and “a business deal that works for both sides” is vastly preferable, he said. NewsRight can give reposters of news content a “better feed” and “clear up any ambiguity about the lawfulness of what you're doing."
NewsRight isn’t collecting any information that its publishing partners don’t already own and could use for litigation if they wanted, Westin said. The organization provides “an approach and code” to track the use of news content around the Web -- the AP’s News Registry “beacon” already does the tracking -- and NewsRight maintains the database. Publishers can get a “very specific measurement” of how their content is consumed on and off their sites, and make decisions from there, he said. They can decide they like the “circulation” they get from unauthorized postings, pursue licensing agreements, or ask NewsRight to help them present “a new product” to sites offering unauthorized content -- say, paying a fee to get an “original version” of a wide range of content updated consistently.
The organization spent the fall getting “up and running,” securing new investors and talking to partners about how NewsRight will conduct licensing and what terms partners will accept, Westin said. It will move beyond the preliminary talks it held with Internet companies, before NewsRight had specifics to offer, and start actual discussions with those companies this week. Asked whether NewsRight is still trying to get holdouts News Corp. and Gannett on board, Westin said it’s in discussions with “one or two large organizations” who have made an “oral commitment” to participate, though not to invest, because the investment round is closed now. A few other potential partners have declined NewsRight’s overtures, he said. Its target for websites available to license is “1,100 to 1,200.”