Hey, everyone. I have been working off and on since December on a new site. Before I continue with it, I was hoping to get some feedback on the feel and legality of it. I have noticed many, many news sites have weird news sections, and they are actually pulling down the whole AP wire or something of the sort. I figured that I would need permission of some sort to do that, so I determined my best bet was to summarize the stories, add a bit of humor, and put a direct link to the entire story.
If my faithful readers deem it to be worthy of a readership too, I will put some more daily effort into it and really build it into something I have done here. I have a Feedburner account set up for it for subscriptions, so I won’t just be going based on hits.
Any positive/negative comments/flames welcome. Please lend me a hand here. I’ve got it listed in MyBlogLog, too.
Thanks a ton.
Jesse Petersen
Very nice layout and a great idea! AFAIK though, you need to purchase the right to publish the stories from the Associated Press. However, with blogging in such a grey area legally, if you summarised the story and provided a link to (and quoted) the source, you’d probably get away with it.
However, if you got popular and started generating revenue, you’d find a lawsuit or two thrown your way – I’d venture to guess.
A friend of mine started a similar idea collating gadget reviews. In the end he wrote a nice RSS parser that crawled 20+ sites and pulled down relevant stories. He copped a ceast & desist quite quickly, but made ~ $5,000 AUD in two months before shutting it down.
Good luck!
Hrmmm…lawsuits don’t sound good. I’d better ask around some more about using the links, then. I would never post the actual content on my site using a parser, because that is no different than stealing the story.
Thanks.