The LA Times reported:
‘If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do?’ [Same Zell] muses.
Not surprisingly, the blogging community went up in arms (1, 2, 3) with a resounding “Google is not stealing content” response. I think the responses represent the attitude problem that permeates the New Media world. I wasn’t at the Zell presentation, but I would wager that Zell is referring to the possibility of content licensing consortiums (CLCs) for the newspaper industry.
Reading through some of these responses, I found another great snippet of ill-informed entitlement:
Google moral of the story? Lawsuits ARE the way to pull Google’s very large financial purse strings!
Google has done a fantastic job building their search and advertising product off of freely supplied index-able web data; but online newspaper/magazine, video & audio content is protected by copyright. If Google settled with the AFP (and AP) aren’t they admitting to stealing content and the need to license that content from these associations? The answer is YES and the key is:
With the other major Internet players like AOL, Yahoo or MSN, [The AFP] have been licensing our content to them for years and years
Additionally, the argument that “Google does not make money off of Google News” is not correct. Sure, Google doesn’t place ads on the Google News page, but it is supplying a free service which creates a portfolio of services that keep users coming back to the Google platform.
Google News Provides a Value-Add for Newspapers, but it Walks a Fine Line
Google’s settlement with the AP and the AFP reveals that it would rather pay for content than face a full lawsuit. Zell is onto the CLC argument and if I were Google, I would fear the power of a $59 billion industry. I agree that Google improves newspaper article search-ability, but it needs to admit content has value so everyone can work together.
It is in Google’s best interest to work with the newspaper industry, because pretty soon a lot of large competitors and content providers will band together to better enforce copyright protection and licensing standards.
3 comments
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April 9, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Zac Echola
Question: does linking to any of the sites you link to mean you stole their content?
The AFP suit was brought on mostly because google was indexing, resizing, hosting and displaying copyrighted photos. AFP and AP and every other news organization has every right to protect their content from being “stolen” in this way.
But, I just can’t possibly see how linking back to a newspaper’s Web site is considered stealing when hypertext is the foundation of the Web.
You’re right, though. Content does have value, but I disagree with your implying that Google doesn’t recognize that when it links directly to the source and credits the source.
April 9, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Kyle Redinger
Zac, Google does a little more than just link with Google News. As far as stealing vs linking; it is a fine line and I think the media industry will push for more formality in the definition in the upcoming years. If Google does pursue the “we don’t need to license content” route as it does with video, they will experience a backlash from the industry. Believe me, the newspaper industry does not think highly of Google, but eliminating Google from a newspaper search can also be deadly. That’s the irony of the whole situation.
April 9, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Zac Echola
I agree with you that it’s a fine line. Since they only take the headline and sometimes about characters of the story, I’d argue that it falls into fair use.
Though I have heard the interesting argument that if Google does it for every story, it’s no longer fair use.
However, if newspapers don’t want their news displayed anywhere on the Internet except their own sites, they’re going to be moving in the wrong directions for the Web.
The onus should be on the news Web sites to either turn off robots.txt or to put their content behind a paywall if they feel it’s too valuable for indexing.