Online newspaper content-tracking and licensing company NewsRights folds, transfers brand, existing contracts to Moreover Technologies, passes advocation of news protection to the Newspaper Assn. of America

Kendall Sinclair

NEW YORK , May 17, 2013 (Associated Press) – NewsRight, an organization created to turn unauthorized publishers of newspaper content on the Internet into licensed customers, said it is disbanding and transferring its operations to Moreover Technologies, which monitors how Moreover's clients are portrayed in the media.

NewsRight said that Moreover will get the NewsRight brand and will offer new contracts to the organization's current customers.

Moreover is working with BurrellesLuce, another media monitoring company, to expand NewsRight's licensing efforts, NewsRight said.

NewsRight said its previous role of advocating for the protection of original news content will be assumed by the Newspaper Association of America.

NewsRight was launched in January 2012 to track the unpaid online use of content from The Associated Press and nearly 30 other news organizations. It provided publishers with licenses to content from leading news publishers, including Hearst Newspapers, The E.W. Scripps Co., Lee Enterprises Inc., A.H. Belo Corp., the Tampa Bay Times and The Christian Science Monitor.

David Westin, who was previously president of ABC News for 14 years, headed the organization until he stepped down last summer and became an adviser.

NewsRight grew out of efforts started by the AP and its partners in October 2010 to track the use of stories on websites, blogs and other Internet forums through what it called the News Registry.

Before this month's announcement, Moreover already had a multiyear deal with NewsRight for the right to use content from hundreds of newspaper websites. In 2007, the AP sued Moreover for copyright infringement, alleging that the company continuously accessed and electronically published the AP's news reports without authorization. The sides reached a settlement a year later, the terms of which were not disclosed.

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