News International starts search engine block

14:00 11th January 2010

Global media empire News International has begun its plan to stop search engines from finding and distributing its content.

The Times newspaper website has stopped news aggregator site NewsNow from accessing and distributing the Times's copyrighted material by altering its robots.txt file.

NewsNow's managing director Struan Bartlett described the move as "lamentable" and claimed his site had been singled out by News International, noting that no other major search engine has been blocked.

Mr Bartlett said: "We can understand why a website would attempt to block a search engine that was abusing its resources or blatantly stealing content. But this clearly isn't the case with NewsNow."

In October the site was threatened with legal action by British newspapers and defended itself with an open letter from Mr Bartlett on the NewsNow site saying: "We operate within the law, and we don't do you any harm."

At the end of last year the site's subscription service pulled links to many newspaper websites after the Newspaper Licensing Agency tried to impose a fee structure.

NewsNow is visited by two million users each month and is second only to Google News in the news aggregator market with a 20 per cent share.

News International is yet to comment on the move.