Two newspapers have served a cease-and-desist notice on a Maine-based online news organization they say has been illegally profiting from their work.

Unless Maine NewsSimply first obtains permission, the notice says it must stop republication of content produced by MaineBiz and The Times Record — a process beyond what is typically accepted as “aggregating” news content on the Internet. 

A news “aggregator” is typically a website that collects headlines or snippets of news, but no more.

The notice does not object to Maine NewsSimply providing links to newspapers’ websites, but says “a hyperlink to a news story reproduced on Maine NewsSimply’s own website is not news aggregating and is unacceptable.”

“We object to MaineNewsSimply using the I-Frames and pop-up ads that make our webpages look like their webpages,” MaineBiz Publisher Donna Brassard said. She said the practice is “usurping our brand and reducing our advertisers’ value.”

The notice by Sig Schutz, a media lawyer with Preti Flaherty, comes after he wrote a similar letter on behalf of the Portland Press Herald earlier this year.

“The law is catching up with technology, in that there has to be some backstop for news organizations to be able to profit from the content they pay to produce,” Schutz said.

Online news sites that take content from traditional sources without permission or payment do not have the same overhead or other costs of newspapers, Schutz said, but have been profiting from their work.

“These companies have no overhead, sometimes not even a newsroom or reporters. Just a little information technology and selling some ads,” Schutz said.

Newspapers are defending their content amid long-term revenue declines, as consumers seek free news on the Web and advertisers increasingly interact with their customers directly using websites and other social media.

“One of the important principles here is that news gathering isn’t free,” Times Record Managing Editor Bob Mentzinger said. “Unless a secondary news site is compensating us for the considerable effort it takes to produce the news, we’d rather them not be able to take it and profit from it. It’s stealing.”

Earlier this year, a federal judge in New York ruled that a paid clipping service called Meltwater infringed copyright by sending clients excerpts of stories from The Associated Press.

U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote rejected Meltwater’s argument that reusing content constituted “fair use” — the principle that once a news item is published, it enters the public domain and can be used by anyone without permission and free of charge.

As opposed to Google, which aggregates news items in its Google News product, “Meltwater is an expensive subscription service that markets itself as a news clipping service, not as a publicly available tool to improve access to content across the Internet,” Cote said in her 91-page ruling.

“Permitting Meltwater to take the fruit of AP’s labor for its own profit, without compensating AP, injures AP’s ability to perform this essential function of democracy,” she wrote.

Meltwater plans to appeal the AP ruling.

Calls to Portland-based Maine NewsSimply were not returned Wednesday.

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