Report Says 75,000 Web Sites a Month Use Unlicensed Newspaper Articles

As the debate over the Internet's impact on the traditional news industry goes on, and publishers try to decide whether to charge for content, a new study says that during a one-month period 75,195 Web sites re-used at least one article taken from a newspaper in full or nearly full form.

The study was conducted by the Fair Syndication Consortium, a group that includes more than 1,500 publishers, which trolled the Internet between October 15 and November 15. The consortium's goal is to ensure creators of original content get compensated when it is used elsewhere, such as by receiving a share of ad revenue.

The researchers found 111,933 nearly exact copies of newspaper articles on the Web sites it surveyed. In these cases at least 80 percent of the original article or more was used.

Another 163,173 stories were excerpted, meaning more than 125 words were re-used but less than 80 percent of the original articles.

Articles from large national newspapers are re-used as many as 15 times.

The study found that blog sites, which it said are most often cited as having the most re-used content, made up less than 10 percent of the "re-using" sites.

The study said that many of the sites re-using the content are, in effect, monetizing it because of the revenue they get from Google and Yahoo's ad networks.