PRESS GAZETTE – 13/08/2019
Charlotte Tobitt
The chief executive of a UK news aggregator has shared fears that the EU Copyright Directive could have “perverse consequences” for small and medium publishers, ultimately reducing media plurality. Struan Bartlett, who co-founded Newsnow in 1998, has spoken out about what he called the controversial concept of forcing fees on a website that sends traffic to news publications. Under the Copyright Directive, aggregators and social media networks will have to pay if they use any more than a “very short extract” or “individual words” of content from a news publisher.