What’s the law around aggregating news online? A Harvard Law report on the risks and the best practices � Nieman Journalism Lab

What’s the law around aggregating news online? A Harvard Law report on the risks and the best practices � Nieman Journalism Lab: Applied to Feed Aggregators, the first fair use factor cuts slightly in favor of a finding of fair use because of the transformative nature of the categorization and indexing functions performed by the Feed Aggregators. The Ninth Circuit has repeatedly found that certain reproductions of copyrighted works by a search engine are a “transformative” use. In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., the Ninth Circuit found that the reproduction of thumbnails of plaintiff’s photographs in defendant’s search engine results was transformative, noting that “[the search engine’s] use of the images serves a different function than [plaintiff’s] use — improving access to information on the internet versus artistic expression.” Likewise, in Perfect 10, Inc v. Amazon.com, Inc., the court noted the significant public benefit provided by Google’s image search “by incorporating an original work into a new work, namely, an electronic reference tool,” and observed that “a search engine may be more transformative than a parody because a search engine provides an entirely new use of the original work, while a parody typically has the same entertainment purpose as the original work.”