> I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6.
Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.
By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.
(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)
Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.
By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.
(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)