Repost.Us Gives Publishers an Easy Way to Syndicate Articles Online

Seth Fiegerman2013-04-20 02:19:25 UTC

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Name: Repost.Us

One-Liner Pitch: Repost.Us helps publishers share and embed complete articles on the web, including the original publisher's advertising and branding.

Why It's Taking Off: The startup aims to make it as easy for publishers to share complete articles as YouTube makes it to share videos.

For years, people in the media have been debating the proper etiquette for re-posting portions of an article from one online publication to another. Now, one new startup is trying put this issue to rest once and for all.

Repost.Us, a free service that launched earlier this week, provides publishers with a platform to share and embed full articles in the same way that YouTube lets users embed video clips. Websites can add a Repost button to their articles, which others can click on to re-publish all of the content in the article — along with videos, the original publisher's advertising and branding, and any updates to the article that occur afterwards. Repost also provides a directory of content that publishers can search through and publish on their own website.

"The fundamental problem, we realized, is that it's really hard to share content on the Internet," John Pettitt, the company's founder and CEO, told Mashable in an interview. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I say that. It's easy to share a link, but if you want to share an article, you have to ask permission and manually copy it and make sure you get it right."

Pettitt, a serial entrepreneur who launched multiple companies in the '90s, had been quasi-retired from the tech world in recent years. Yet, he felt inspired to dive back in with Repost after seeing some of his friends struggle with trying to get permission to re-publish articles or, on the flip side, having their own articles lifted with little to no attribution.

"If you look at the history of syndication, you wrote content and sent it over the hill to the next place to run it," Pettitt says. But in recent years, he believes, publishers have chosen to believe in the power of links back rather than risk letting publications syndicate entire articles. "Everybody got stuck in this fiction that they're only one link away so they can come to me."

Much of this, of course, comes down to page views and ad revenue. Until now, if one website took another's article without linking back, the latter publication would be at risk of losing visitors and impressions. But according to Repost, even with a link, the vast majority of readers won't click through to the original website. With Repost, on the other hand, the original publisher can syndicate their content and still get page views and ad revenue from it.

In short, the goal for Repost, according to Pettitt, is to make it easy for big and small publishers to profit from sharing complete articles as it is for content producers to share and profit from videos using the embed code from websites like YouTube.

Repost currently has articles available to re-share from thousands of websites, including Fox Sports, PandoDaily and newspapers like the Times-Picayune. There are about 3.4 million articles in its system right now, with 20,000-40,000 more added each day.

Pettitt says his team has reached out to many publishers and has found that they tend to fall into one of two camps: there are those that get the concept and those that he describes as "Lord of the Rings publishers," which "treat their content as My Precious," and won't let it be sent out elsewhere. As Pettitt himself admits, Repost probably makes more sense for smaller publishers in need of exposure rather than bigger institutions like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal who may worry about "business cannibalization."

Repost has already received some praise from those in the journalism world. In an announcement for the public launch earlier this week, Repost quoted journalism professor Jeff Jarvis who said that the service "should end the wars over aggregation and copyright."

The startup has six employees and is privately funded, though Pettitt says he is looking to raise a Series A round of funding later this year. Repost generates revenue by placing an ad of its own in the stories that get embedded and by using its service to distribute marketing content.

Image courtesy of Repost

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Is Clipping Articles Fair Use? U.S. Court Says No

Pete Pachal2013-03-25 18:14:15 UTC

The term "fair use" gets thrown around a lot in copyright cases, and it refers to an exception to copyright law that allows for the publication of portions or derivations of a copyrighted work — without the permission of the original creator. On the web, fair use has been used to defend aggregators such as Google News, since they take portions of articles to create a service.

Does that label also apply to a service that does a similar thing, but for a newsletter? A U.S. court recently said it doesn't.

As paidContent describes, a federal court ruled that Meltwater, a Norwegian company that does "news and social media monitoring" was violating copyright with its newsletter service. Meltwater's service scans articles for keywords, then takes the headline, the first paragraph or "lede," and the parts of the story where the keyword appears.

The Associated Press sued Meltwater, saying it was violating the AP's copyright on the articles, and that it needed to purchase a license to serve up its content in this way. Meltwater defended its actions under copyright's fair-use doctrine, saying its newsletter service was doing basically the same thing that Google does every second of every day.

Heavy hitters took sides. The Electronic Frontier Federation backed Meltwater, warning that if the AP was successful in its claim, it would have a chilling effect on innovation and free expression. Meanwhile, The New York Times and others sided with the AP, saying Meltwater was a "free-rider" operating a "wholesale copying and redistribution" service.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote riled in favor of the AP. While on first blush Meltwater's service doesn't appear to be all that different from Google News, it's all in the details.

The law around fair use inherently allows for flexibility, but whether or not a particular complaint amounts to a violation is dependent on four factors: the purpose of the duplicated content, the nature of the copyrighted work, how much of the original was copied, and the effect on the market.

The first factor — the purpose of the use — is often the most important factor in a fair-use case, and it was so here. In her 90-page ruling, the judge rejected Meltwater's claim that its service was like a search engine, which passes the fair-use test because creating a page with several links changes the context essentially "transforms" the copyrighted work into a different kind of service.

That wasn't the case with Meltwater, the judge said, for three reasons. First, the service acted more like a competitor to the AP than a facilitator, she wrote, pointing to the newsletter's click-through rates on articles, which were less than one-tenth of 1%. By comparison, she said Google News users clicked through 56% of the time, citing a 2009 report from Outsell.

Second, by reproducing an article's lede and keyword sentences in their entirety, Meltwater was essentially taking the "heart" of the stories it was excerpting, rather than serving as a teaser, she wrote. Finally, she believed the newsletter was taking more of the articles than was needed for a "search engine" type of service.

The ruling will certainly be appealed, but it could serve as a precedent in determining where the line is for services that depend on excerpting third-party content.

What's your take? Should Meltwater have to pay the AP to clip portions of its articles for a newsletter, or should fair use apply here? Vote in our poll, then tell us your reasoning in the comments.

Image via iStockphoto, tomacco

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