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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."
According to Eric Schmidt, advertising on Google News is a simple matter of priority and importance related to other things in their TODO list. To them, adding more news sources is more important than placing the ads - but he makes a point that ads will come sooner or later. Interesting presentation by the way.
Technology ramblings : Simple is Beautiful
Publishers have the same problem that the record companies have. They could produce far more content than the shops can deal with. The RIAA isn't about music, its about getting little bits of plastic moved through the checkouts at shops. Book publishers aren't about literature, its about moving dead trees through the checkouts at shops. There are now millions of people who have better facilities to make music than the Beetles had so there is a potential for a million times more records to be produced. The RIAA's (and the shops) business model can't cope with that and neither can the book publishers.
I listened to Stephen King talk about the modern publishing business. He is convinced it has been messed up so bad for so long that no decent new author is ever likely to get published. He uses his wife's work as an example. He thinks she is a better author than he is yet the only ones that want to publish her work are using his name to sell the book. He also mentioned that the big book stores (B&N, Boarders) who stack narrow and deep are killing the hope of many authors where the smaller book shops would stock wide but shallow and would order a copy of a book or two and if they sold, would report it to the NYT top 100. Then Wal-mart would look at the things in the top 20 that they hadn't sold and buy a million copies of each which would then mess up the top 10 stats. A decade ago the data being reported for the NYT best seller list was already not very useful and he fears that it will soon be meaningless.
If you ever get a chance to hear Stephen King speak, go listen to him. He's a very good presenter even if your not into his books.
So then you are saying that if people can get their news free on the internet from one source independantly of another source, people won't go to the non-free source?
Well, yes, why would we expect any differently? Here's the thing; it IS possible to make money on the internet. Banner advertising such as Google AdSense makes site owners a lot of money these days, as long as people can make money by putting stuff on websites they can continue to offer it for "free".
So yes, as far as the success of things like Google AdSense is concerned, online content CAN remain free. A good example is Digg. They're making all their money off a SINGLE GOOGLE AD, and now they've got millions in venture capital to grow much faster. Or look at sites like Anandtech that produce a LOT of money managing their own ads, and still produce an enormous amount of original content (More than computer magazines, but they're free).
Google News links don't provide cache links.
I've also found that some Google News links can't be found on Google proper. I discovered that when trying to follow a news link where the site pretended to be down when you tried to access that particular story directly (other accesses to the same site went through fine). Later a different version of the story was up that didn't match Google News' blurb.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The best isn't even a commercial venture..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
> 'This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.'
In other news, the RIAA says that P2P file sharing is "unlikely to be sustainable for music publishers in the longer term".
Yawn.
The Web is all about the links, baby. If the existence of Web links is "not sustainable" to a particular company's business model, then that simply means the company has not yet learned to deal with the reality of the Web.
Adapt or die.
Actually what you're doing most likely is search Google, the search engine.
When you search Google News, you won't see a single ad. So therefore, that statement above is correct.
I guess there is only so much money to go around in the economy, if Google is making a huge profit, someone else is getting less.
Economics is not zero-sum. That's a myth made up by people that want to force socialism down everyone's throat.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
alizard Linux
If I write a book, I very definitely want my stuff online and searchable.
If my book is any good, the more people who see it, the more are going to buy it. Making the book good is my problem, and to a smaller extent, that of my editors. Make the book invisible and nobody will buy it.
Isn't making money off IP content what publishing is supposed to be about? Not making content invisible or putting it on sale after locking it into a digital toilet.
BTW, the only real success I know with respect to digital-age publishing is Baen Books.
They make their backlist free and downloadable with no DRM and no brain-dead e-reader software, open in your word processsor or browser. They do the same with their current books, only you have to pay for those.
The first hit is always free is a time honored and sound marketing principle. Once you're read the first several books in a series, the buying decision on the next few is a very easy one to make, especially since the content doesn't have DRM-crapware on it that makes it harder to read where I feel like reading it. They're also cheaper since they don't have to pay print costs, just bandwidth. This isn't hypothetical, I've already bought several of their books and plan on buying 2 or 3 more as soon as I get my next article check.
The French publishers simply want government protection for an industrial-age business model, just like the crapheads at the *AA member labels and studios do... fuck 'em.
Tech Public Policy stuff
There are copyrights, and then there are copynorms.
You don't opt into anything someone can do with your content, merely by distributing your content.
True, but a copynorm had developed that when a copyright owner publishes a work on the World Wide Web for anonymous access, the copyright owner intends for it to be seen by as many people as possible, and thus automated systems have the right to cache it verbatim until the copyright owner decides otherwise. In October 1998, the United States Congress codified this copynorm as law in 17 USC 512(b), enacted as a rider to the DMCA.