David S. Hilzenrath, Washington Post Staff Writer

The Washington Post, February 11, 1997

On the World Wide Web, there are Web sites, and there are parasites.

At least that's the view of some online publishers, who are chagrined to see their content packaged by others who affix their own advertising to it.

The debate involves a technology called framing, which enables one Web site to display content from another Web site, partially superimposed with a new frame or border. The practice is testing the boundaries of copyright and trademark law on the Web, where complex material can be copied with a few strokes at a keyboard.

A site called TotalNews.com illustrates the possibilities. It generates no original content. Rather it presents content from news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Dow Jones & Co., and The Washington Post Co.

Visitors to TotalNews yesterday could click a button and go to Time's daily news page, featuring a photo of Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Part of the screen was taken up by a banner ad for TotalNews sponsor NewsPage, a personalized Internet news service. That banner ad obscured an ad on the Time site for PointCast, which competes with NewsPage. Only by scrolling down could the user have viewed the PointCast ad, which on the Time site was partially visible at the bottom of the screen.

"We're here to make it easy for the user," said TotalNews President Roman Godzich.

"A lot of news organizations are very pleased by what they're doing," because TotalNews generates more visitors to their sites, said Lisa Farringer, a Washington attorney representing TotalNews.

But several news organizations, including The Post, have accused TotalNews of violating their rights. In a December letter to Godzich, New York lawyer Bruce P. Keller said that "TotalNews 'reaps' where it does not 'sow.' "

"Its business -- the sale of advertising space -- depends entirely on its ability to misappropriate the news and other material appearing on the Web sites of others," Keller wrote on behalf of Time, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, Dow Jones and The Post. The wire service Reuter also has raised objections.

TotalNews casts the dispute as a David and Goliath story. "I think it's a question of access -- whether the Internet is going to be about free access to information or about control by large media corporations," Godzich said. TotalNews says that it is within its legal rights.

In an interview, Keller said "the legal issues I think are very clear and all come out in favor of the media companies."

Farringer disagreed. "The law on this question . . . is unclear . . . it is very much up in the air," she said.

TotalNews has posted a disclaimer saying that it exercises no editorial control over the content it frames, but Keller said the disclaimer fails to solve the problem.

TotalNews accuses its accusers of hypocrisy, noting that The Post sometimes frames outside content within its WashingtonPost.com site. The Post has a policy of giving viewers the option of making the frame go away, said Ralph Terkowitz, The Washington Post Co.'s vice president for technology, though there may be scattered pages where that's not yet possible. And it doesn't superimpose ads on outside content, he said.

But the WashingtonPost.com logo that appears in the frame is tantamount to an ad for The Post, TotalNews says.

Terkowitz said he doesn't view the logo as advertising, but rather as a way of distinguishing the framed content from The Post's navigational toolbar, a series of buttons on the screen. Unlike TotalNews, The Post would stop framing a site if the site's publisher requested, Terkowitz said.

Another site that frames content is LookSmart, a subsidiary of Reader's Digest Association Inc.

"The vast majority of sites I'm sure are very happy to have been selected by us," said LookSmart Chief Executive Evan Thornley. "What we're doing is driving traffic to their site, so it's a win-win."

Scott Woelfel, vice president and editor in chief of CNN Interactive, said framing is disruptive because it alters the layout of Web pages, changing what the viewer sees.

CNN has fought back with a software fix that eliminates the frame, but Woelfel doesn't view that as the last word. "I imagine that some smart programmer out there will find a way around what we've done," he said.

Framing isn't the only way technology can come between Web publishers and their audiences. The widespread practice of "caching" means that what you see isn't always what it seems.

You may think you're visiting a Web site housed on the site publisher's computer, but there's a good chance you're visiting a copy of the site stored or "cached" on the system through which you access the Internet -- for example, your employer's corporate computers or those of an online service.

America Online Inc., the Dulles-based leader in Internet access, caches 80 percent of the Web sites its subscribers visit.

Caching's fans say it adds speed and efficiency. For the user, calling up a cached site can be 10 percent to 60 percent faster than reaching out over the Web to retrieve the data from its source, said David Gang, AOL's senior vice president for product marketing. It also cuts congestion on the Internet, they say -- the material is downloaded once to the cache site and viewed by many people, rather than traveling across the Internet each time another person wants to see it.

"It's all about saving time and making the Internet much more efficient for everybody," Gang said.

Some publishers object to the practice, saying it can prevent them from tracking the number of people who view their site. That information is potentially important in setting the rates they charge advertisers.

"It deprives us of the ability to monitor how our site is used, how often and by whom it's used," said Joe Alfenito, manager of multimedia and information technology systems for WRC-TV, which provides news, weather and other information on the Web.

Users and publishers also complain that caching can keep readers from receiving the most up-to-the-minute versions of Web sites if the sites aren't cached frequently and punctually.

"Here we're investing a lot of resources in keeping the material fresh and current, and it's a proxy [computer] we have no control over which is making us look stale or dated," Alfenito said.

"The theory is that stuff won't be out of date," Terkowitz said. "It just is sometimes."

AOL's Gang said caching methods used by AOL and others are designed to automatically update sites frequently enough to avoid such delays. For sites that are constantly changing, he said, AOL's system takes users directly to the originals, rather than relying on cached versions.