Law Commons^™

A Preliminary First Amendment Analysis Of Leglisation Treating News Aggregation As Copyright Infringement, Alfred C. Yen

Alfred C. Yen

The newspaper industry has recently experienced economic difficulty. Profits have declined because fewer people read printed versions of newspapers, preferring instead to get their news through so-called "news aggregators" who compile newspaper headlines and provide links to storied posted on newspaper websites. This harms newspaper revenue because news aggregators collect advertising revenue that newspapers used to enjoy. Some have responded to this problem by advocating the use of copyright to give newspapers the ability to control the use of their stories and headlines by news aggregators. This proposal is controversial, for news aggregators often do not commit copyright infringement. Accordingly, …