News aggregation is the next battleground

The blogosphere has come to accept the idea of online feed aggregators, as long as only excerpts of posts are republished. Now that Google has become everyone's favorite target, the subject of news aggregation looks to be the next area of dispute. The World Association of Newspapers is making the latest "they're stealing our content" accusations. They are objecting to the use of excerpts by search engines as a violation of fair use, and the group's president, Gavin O'Reilly, has adopted the catchy phrase of "Napsterization" to describe the process. Remember the old line about never picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel? I guess we will find out if the people who buy ink and paper can take on one of the world's biggest purchasers of networked PCs and bandwidth. (via Susan Mernit)