Posts Tagged: "news aggregators"

Copyright Office Study Finds Protections for News Publishers are Adequate

On June 30, the U.S. Copyright Office officially published a report titled Copyright Protections for Press Publishers, which explores existing frameworks in nations around the world providing additional rights under copyright law for news publishers, and includes recommendations regarding similar changes that could be effected under U.S. law. The Copyright Office’s study concludes that, while the news publishing industry is facing significant problems in obtaining adequate funding during the Internet era, those problems are not due to any current shortcomings in the state of U.S. copyright law.

Poor management at Facebook leads to allegations of de facto censorship for some conservatives

News that Facebook engaged in suppressing content from conservative groups was first reported by Gizmodo in early May. The online publication reported comments from former Facebook workers who said they were instructed to prevent stories on conservative figures and major conservative events like CPAC from appearing in the website’s Trending News section. Since that news hit, individual Facebook users and organizations alike have come out saying that they had posts banned for no better reason than the fact that they expressed a conservative point of view.

Google Seeks Patent on Social News Aggregator

We profile one patent application that seeks to converge content from social networks with the news feed that a person sees when browsing a news aggregator service. Google wants to patent a system that analyzes a user’s social media feeds to pull up relevant media or comments that may enhance the value of browsing through news stories. Other patent applications protect better routing systems, both for public transportation as well as personal vehicles, and one discusses an interesting system of providing instant text translations between two foreign parties on one tablet computer. In the section regarding the patents issued recently to Google, we’ve found a few interesting improvements to online digital technologies, especially those meant to help digital rights owners and legal teams. One patent protects a system of identifying a copyrighted composition by analyzing the melody of a live recording, while another provides a more cost-effective process of electronic discovery of legal documents. More routing services are protected by other Google patents that we discuss here, showing Google is actively seeking to expand its holdings in online mapping applications.

Associated Press Continues its Fight Against News Aggregators

AP’s common law misappropriation claim has its origins in a remarkably similar suit AP brought against a competing news service almost a century ago. In INS v. AP the Supreme Court, in 1918, enjoined INS, a competing news service, from free-riding on the work product of AP. The misappropriation action was based on INS re-distributing information to its customers which AP had previously released into the public domain. INS was enjoined from using the information for a limited time period while it was hot news (i.e. while it had commercial value as news). The Supreme Court’s decision was based on two rationales: (1) preventing unacceptable conduct in the form of a commercial enterprise free-riding on the investment of time and money by a competitor; and (2) avoiding the resulting ruinous competition that could result from a commercial enterprise free-riding on the efforts of a competitor.