Sunday, October 29, 2006

Copyrights

The Internet has opened up a lot of issues regarding copyrights, I will not even try to cover this huge subject just attempt to highlight a number of aspects we I recently noticed. Sportingo like many other content sites actively seeks ways to promote its content on third party aggregations sites. Services such as Google News, News Now and many others are a great platform to drive relevant traffic to your articles. The value for the aggregator is getting free content which they can then package and present to a larger audience. One of the issues that we are dealing with is presenting images on these third party aggregation sites. Sportingo licenses images from several sources including Getty Images and Reuters (more on the image licensing business and how it has changed over the past five years in a separate entry), the license allows us to present images in an editorial context. Currently most third party news aggregators do not present images, but rather headlines and in some cases a short insert from our articles. But some of these aggregators are beginning to show images on their sites. This needs opens an interesting licensing issue. Do the news aggregators need to licensee the right to present the image? Do the publisher need to re negotiate the right to present the image on third party aggregation sites? I will be investigating this subject over the next few weeks and promise to update as I learn more about the subject.

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