Abstract
There’s a world-wide phenomenon showing a decline of sale in traditional newspaper industry. As online news aggregators thrive, newspaper publishers are going through a hard time when readers are now accessing free news through internet. The loss of readers means the loss of advertising revenue. While gathering news, writing and editing articles, printing and distributing newspapers are costly, the loss of readers strikes newspaper publishers since newspaper industry relies heavily on advertising revenue. To the contrary, news aggregators have a relatively low entry barrier in news disseminating. By gathering information from all kinds of sources and putting them on one platform, news aggregators indeed provide an efficient way to access news and consequently attract even more readers and advertisers. Newspaper publishers have sought legal protection, asserting that online news websites like news aggregators are copying and free-riding their hard-earned contents. Nevertheless, news reporting often contains objective facts, which are not protected under copyright law unless the stories are original enough to show human expression. Even if the asserted news is copyrightable subject matter, aggregators are likely to apply fair use doctrine as a defense to an action for copyright infringement. In the face of the conflicts between newspaper publishers and news aggregators, this article intend to draw a fine line in between by categorizing the different models of news aggregators and analyzing cases that indicate how courts interpret the application of fair use doctrine of copyright law in digital age. This article will further look into the possibility of potential licensing and revenue sharing models between newspaper publishers and news aggregators by pointing out the experience from a few newspaper publishers.