Mathew Ingram points us to the news that some UK newspapers are apparently threatening UK-based news aggregator NewsNow. I’ve used NewsNow in the past, and I can’t see what the complaint is — at all. NewsNow provides headlines and links. That’s it. At least when I was using it, it didn’t even provide summary text. I actually discovered a lot of useful new sources when I used it, and that’s because NewsNow always struck me as one of the best aggregators out there. It found a lot more than most of the others. To be honest, my big complaint with NewsNow is that they limit their free feeds significantly — and there’s no RSS or anything. After a while, I just gave up on using it, because without RSS, it just didn’t fit into my daily method of following the news, no matter how useful the site is. However, it’s really difficult to see what sort of complaint any newspaper could have with such a service whose sole purpose is to drive more traffic. It is, as the link above so colorfully describes:
the equivalent of a herd of donkeys filing a class action suit against the inventor of the wheel….
Unless there’s something more to these legal threats — and, admittedly, only one side is weighing in on what happened here, the whole thing just seems like a stretch by at least some UK newspapers to try to intimidate online sites into paying them.
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