Online Content Cannot Remain Free

gamer4Life writes "Publishers from Europe are complaining that Internet search engines are making money off their copyright-protected material. 'This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.', says Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council. These comments are despite the fact that Google does not place ads on their news service. 'Search engines do not reproduce content. They help users find content by pointing to where it exists on the Web.', says Google spokesman, Steve Langdon. This comes after a French news service sued Google for at least $17.5 million."

Comments

Well BOO HOO

[alexborges]

Fuck this crybabies. Its sickening to think of this 80 year old publishing house CEO's thinking... damn, this geeky people are fucking us over.

I mean:
a) put your pants back on and start producing digital content that is not available to google. Safari seams to do this just fine.

b) Put your pants back on and get the hell out of the "content" business you so gleefully claim is yours. If youre so dependant on the medium of transmission, chances are youre just a middle man and the supply chain just got smarter. Your content has no value if the only thing it has going for it is that I can only get it from you.

c) Put your pants back on and start doing your job. I mean, like, editing books so that its content is consumable. Do a good job at it, and people will pay to see it. I pay for safari, id pay for whatever you have to offer if it has any use for me.

How about just this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then don't publish on the fucking web you goddamb dinosaur shitheads.

And any political argument on this is just wasted.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[martin-boundary]

Perhaps you need to stop with the superlatives, and say something relevant.

Google sends business to these retards, if anything. Those that can't make that simple connection need to do us all a favor, and stop breathing.

And that has precisely squat to do with copyright issues. It's a good thing you're not doing any astro-turfing yourself, because that sounds suspiciously like the argument the warez kiddies use to justify cracking software, eg if it's cracked and free to download, then more people will try the software and eventually buy it.

If you had any idea what you're talking about, then you'd have realized that the issue is copyright: the content producers (writers, photographers, wholesale news agencies) have it, the content consumers (online news and magazine websites) don't have it. Third level consumers like people and Google have no part in the contract between the media owners and the website operators.

Since the website operators have no rights to the material beyond a limited license to use them, the whole robots.txt issue is moot - there is no implied agreement between Google and the website operators, since one can't allow somebody else to copy something one doesn't own the rights to in the first place.

The website operators are guilty of the equivalent of leaving their keys in the car. Google is guilty of the equivalent of borrowing the key and making a copy, then offering paying joyrides to third parties.

And finally, you might find it interesting to know that most news media content available on the web is produced by a very small number of sources, with everyone else paying for the privilege to repackage it. If Google agrees to stop showing the material produced by the big three (Reuters, AFP, Associated Press), then 90% of international news on Google will disappear, and all you'll have is the local kitten stories and the odd op-ed.