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

Profit Elsewhere

[biocute]

I don't think the European Publishers Council is only referring to Google News, but the whole idea of people start relying on search engines to get their news feed. And sometimes, you will be able to find a news that is free on one site, and by subscription on another (eg NYTimes vs CNN).

And what about cached news articles that could have already been removed from the news site and turned into a pay-per-view article?

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.

These comments are despite the fact that Google does not place ads on their news service

But when I searched for "DeLay", there are few "news" links at the very top of the result page, and a sponsored link by www.nytimes.com.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[AKAImBatman]

And sometimes, you will be able to find a news that is free on one site, and by subscription on another (eg NYTimes vs CNN).

Which is how Capitalism is supposed to work. I realize that many companies are just looking after their own interests, but they probably don't even realize that they're actually being anti-competitive and that "fair-use" is intended to cover exactly this type of situation.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[ceoyoyo]

Google news gives you a little snippet of the article, then a link to the page it came from -- just like their search does. So, just like search, you click on the link and go to the copyright owner's page -- complete with revenue generating ads.

If the copyright owner doesn't like this he should block Google from indexing his pages and watch what happens.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[pla]

And sometimes, you will be able to find a news that is free on one site, and by subscription on another (eg NYTimes vs CNN).

And sometimes, I can make my own bread instead of paying SunBeam for the pasty white styrofoam they sell under that name.


I guess there is only so much money to go around in the economy

You might think that, wouldn't you? But no. Spend all you want, the governments will print more. Of course, the money you have now becomes less valuable as a result, but if you think we don't have inflation by design, I have a bridge to sell you for just a dollar (inflation retroadjusted to the birth of the solar system).

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[IAmTheDave]

Agreed. Also, arguing that content that was once free is now pay-per-view is (excuse me) stupid, because once information is free it tends to remain free. Arguing that information already disseminated may now be locked up is half the reason that Secrecy News and the FAS exist. (It's a comparison.)

I understand (to a degree) copyright, but a redaction in previously public information by any party - government or private - is hardly ever good.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

No, this is a astro-turfed meme. Maybe the parent poster isn't a shill himself, but when people who don't even know what copyright is, are standing around the coffee machine at work, and the subject comes up about how google is stealing from people who write books, something fishy is going on.

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.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[susano_otter]

Clearly, what you don't understand about "the states" is that it's ruled by the consensus of its citizens, most of whom are not actually extreme capitalists. In fact, there happens to be a very large and vocal leftist faction in our population and political arena, which is why you actually see a hodgepodge of assorted compromise policies, rather than the extremist situation you were somehow expecting. But why were you expecting an extremist situation anyway?

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[sco08y]

GP: I guess there is only so much money to go around in the economy

P: You might think that, wouldn't you? But no. Spend all you want, the governments will print more. Of course, the money you have now becomes less valuable as a result, but if you think we don't have inflation by design

First: the notion that there is "only so much money." It is true that there is are only so many nominal dollars/yen/etc. However, you can make money right in your own home! Just get a piece of paper and write "IOU $5" and give it to a friend. Congratulations. You have just increased the total amount of money in the world by $5.

That is, assuming you actually intend to pay your friend back *and* your friend trusts you to do so.

Now, governments *do* need to print money. Not to cause inflation, but because without enough cash people can't do business. Your IOU only works as well as people trust you to pay it back, the five dollar IOU from the federal government is viewed as considerably more reliable.

In the case of hyperinflation you see that a government is printing tons of money and the currency is becoming devalued and make the post hoc error that printing money causes the devaluing of the currency. But what's really happening is that people are losing faith that the government is good on its debts. In wartime Germany, was it the printing of money that made people lose faith in the mark, or was it the fact that they were losing the war?

When you understand that markets are a natural means of communicating information about scarcity of resources and talent you see why the idea that someone can "design" something like inflation is false. Maybe they can significantly influence it or maybe the whole regulating thing is a farce and politicians just take credit for upswings and blame others for downswings. At any rate, the sum value of everything in the world is most directly influenced by creativity and ingenuity, not accounting tricks.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[Arandir]

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.

That is a myth. The economy is not a zero sum game. Everytime you create something that someone else values, you have created new value.

Google and other search engines are creating new value by offering services that would not otherwise exist. There is a value to online news stories from European publishers, but there is more value in the market when they are combined with the search engines to find them. The former does not lose money when the latter makes money.

Of course, the publishers still need to stay current and remain flexible. Just because there is now more value in the market doesn't mean an individual publisher is guaranteed a piece of it.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[Dun Malg]

I guess there is only so much money to go around in the economy,

That's not how the economy works. Money doesn't vanish the first time someone spends it. It goes to someone else, who pays it to someone else, etc. Circulation is the real driving force.

if Google is making a huge profit, someone else is getting less.

It's not a zero-sum game. There's plenty of money for everyone so long as it keeps circulating. The oly way Google can get "someone else's" money is if they directly compete, and in that case it's no longer "their money", it's rightfully Google's.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[Ravatar]

By uploading their web page to a publicly accessable web server, they have opted in.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[martin-boundary]

Google is offering a map. The person who uploaded that file is the one breaking the law.

Not quite. Google is offering the images on its image search service, it's offering the cached text in its search service, it's offering the headlines in its news service. That's a lot of stuff it's doing.

Remember, Google is a company, but from the point of view of copyright, it's a single legal entity. So everything it does as a whole matters.

A better example is probably that of a library.

Libraries are explicitly exempt from copyright infringement, and Google is too so long as it complies with the DMCA. But if an owner says they have to stop offering their material, then either Google complies, or they can be sued for infringement. Clearly it's going to be technically extremely difficult to remove all the material promptly, so they've been sued.

Publishing something on the Internet is just like paper publishing -- that work is now subject to indexing and regular quoting rules -- you can use a small segment so long as you give credit (like Google is doing) but may not reproduce the entire article.

The trouble here is that Google is reproducing the entire article if you think about it. Imagine if you go to the library every day, and copy a single phrase in a book. If you do this a few thousand times, you've reproduced the whole book, and it's definitely no longer fair use. That's what Google is doing. They have internal copies of everything, and they serve small (but different) pieces to people.

Again, libraries can do this, but Google has now been explicitly told to stop from the copyright holders. I hope they find a way to license/settle this, because the net will be poorer otherwise.

Re:Profit Elsewhere

[Kadin2048]

Actually, you can be quite the diehard capitalist and still believe in some regulation of extreme anticompetitive behavior. You can argue about how much regulation is good or the best ways to apply it all day, but there are certain situations (monopolies, cartels) which the market will not self-correct if they have gone past a certain point and good arguments can be made for government interference to fix them. I think very few people would make the argument that there is not any place for regulation at all.

The "cap" on how big you can get doesn't really exist per se; the limit is on your actions. Regulators in the U.S. generally take a dim view of firms that obviously distort the market away from a competitive model, if that distortion hurts consumers. The limits on dumping and market distortion that help consumers (in the short term anyway) are significantly less strict IMO than in Europe.

Also, while America is one of probably the 'most capitalist' major countries in the world, it doesn't mean that there is no demand for regulation to reign in corporations who do things that the citizens don't like. It is a representative democracy -- if you piss off enough voters, eventually you're going to be the subject of a Congressional inquiry, no matter how closely you follow economic theory. (Witness the oil companies.)

What Is?

[ackthpt]

'This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.', says Francisco Pinto Balsemao, head of the European Publishers Council.

The panicking and running around with hands in the air, shouting "the sky is falling"?

I can begin to tell how many authors I've ripped off by reading their entire tomes on-line, snippet by snippet in Google search results.

I haven't.

On the contrary, like Langdon alludes, I hear or see something, pop a few words into Google to do a search, next thing you know my bookshelf, real oak(!), is jamb packed with books.

What do they really want, poverty and security through obscurity?

the new zork times book review shall not quote, nor say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal or i shall sue

In answer to the question...

[Shadow Wrought]

Any industry tied to a technology lends itself to obsolecence. Why should printing be different?

Re:In answer to the question...

[Belseth]

The issue isn't about printing becoming obsolete but writing as a profession. At first it was just E-Books or digitized material that was at risk but now they are starting to scan in printed books and making them availible. How many professional writers will there be if they can no longer sell their work? The cost of printing and distributing written material in some ways has protected the profession but digitized material can be reproduced at little or no cost so it can spread through the internet like a virus. If traditional publishing ceases to exist it won't be a triumph for the internet it'll be a loss for humanity because many talented writers will have to find other professions. Everyone talks about it being a benefit to writers but so far most methods of distribution through the web have failed or involve giving away the writers work. Big business will always survive what is at risk or the livelihoods of artists and creative people. The more it cuts into corporate profits the more they'll turn the screws on the artists and pay less and less for their. You have to remember for every successful writer there's a thousand starving ones. Few get rich and even now most can't make a decent living at it.

Get a brain, moran!

[Rude Turnip]

"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."

What a whiny little biatch. *Every* news outlet with an online presence has one of two choices:

1. Do not make your content openly accessible through the HTTP protocol and charge a fee.
2. Use robots.txt, which Google honours.

Until one of those two actions are taken, Francisco, you have FREELY VOLUNTEERED to offer your content to news aggregators and anyone with a web browser. This is a choice you can make *right now*, instead of complaining like a baby.

Re:Get a brain, moran!

[AK Marc]

This is the same excuse that spammers use: If you don't want it, you can unsubscribe.

If only that worked for spammers. If you could unsubscribe (one file to block all spammers like robots.txt would be nice) from them, they wouldn't be spammers.

Google News

[Michalson]

These comments are despite the fact that Google does not place ads on their news service

That's because the news service is "beta" forever. In fact citing Google News is actually a direct prove of the outside assertion - Google has kept it beta for years (and isn't like to ever make it a "real" service) simply because there is no true model they could legally use. They are screen scraping other people's content and the second they let it be legally defined as anything but an academic exercise (by removing the beta mark or sticking ads on it) they will get hit with a million lawsuits and Google won't have a legal leg to stand on.

Google News, along with most other Google "services", are special cases. Unlike companies that are trying to make money from their services, Google's main goal is to use them to mine personal information from millions of visitors. So it doesn't matter if their software is beta forever, as long as they can have a system that reads your personal email and indexes all keywords found against the GUID that tracks you across every Google site, they will be happy because they can sell expensive targeted advertising on the main Google search and anywhere else that won't get them into legal trouble.

Robots.txt

[queenb**ch]

If they don't want to be spidered, let them turn on the robots.txt. Sheesh! Since they can control what Google has for them in their search results, I fail to see how Google is responsible for that.

Besides, if you're selling content, don't you want people to know you have it? How are they supposed to know that they can buy it otherwise?

Just how big a DUH! does this get?

2 cents,

Queen B

Re:Robots.txt

[Ruprecht the Monkeyb]

Because they want Google to index them so people come to their site. In other words, they not only want to have their cake and eat it too, they want someone else to bring it to their doorstep and pay them for the privilege of delivering it.

Re:Robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the default behavior should be to not index a site UNLESS it has a robots.txt file specifically ALLOWING indexing. Doesn't sound like too big a deal.

Another incompetent publisher pointing fingers.

[ip_freely_2000]

'This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term.'

Search engines have been in common use for almost 15 years now. How much of a 'longer term' do you need?

Besides, Search Engines only point to content. Publishers should enhance their content with proper use f metadata to drive traffic to sites with grrat content people WILL pay for.

In the meantime, it's all just sour grapes.

So let them turn away the search 'bots

[crovira]

Its just a root level notation anyway.

Then they can keep their materials nice and safe and away from the prying eyes
of potential customers.

Search is NOT costing THEM a friggin's dime, if fact or in sales.

If they sit on their books, they'll just get their lunch eaten from them by somebody else'; somebody who put his material in searchable form so that people can find it, then buy it.

Nobody'll ever know about THEIR damn books and nobody'll buy 'em either.

Easy Solution For Google

[rolfwind]

Cut them off. If they don't want exposure, stop indexing them.

They'll come crawling back a month later anyway.

Group: Online content cannot remain free

It's not free, in exchange for my attention, you get to put up banner ads.

I believe many non-pron sites that started out as pay-for ended up offering a free way to view their sites - like Salon.com where you have to view a specific amount of ads before you get to the article. Or you can sign up and not deal with any of it - it's a great solution - choice to the consumer and win/win both ways.

Re:Appropriate response

[HTH NE1]

They probably think they can gather enough traffic just on their names and from advertising in other media (television, radio, other print media).

But really, they'd rather control what stories their readers see and protect against their opinions being listed against opinions of competing publications. They feel they aggregate stories just fine and Google is undermining their wor and discouraging readers from being brand-aware.

When was the last time you visited a site's article on Google News and wanted to visit the home page of the site? A site's front-page cover story means nothing.

Perhaps they recognize that search engine results are effectively free targeted advertising for them. They just see the loss of control over what is and isn't news, and with that a loss of identity in the on-line news business.

ok, opt-out

[eyeball]

I wish there was a way for these companies to opt-out. Sure they'll fracture the internet. Eventually they'll realize that search engines will bring users to their competitors, but by then it will probably be too late. Maybe that's why they want to change the way the net works for them en-mass. In any case, I would love to see the publishers make a single dollar of what Google gets in ad revenues in Google's absence.

There are plenty of examples of industries that make money off the demands generated by others, without paying tribute to the industry creating the demand. Computer manufacturers make money off the demand generated by internet. Radio manufacturers make money off of radio programming. Sure it gets sticky when you're talking about copyright, but even then there's precedence. TV Guide makes money indexing TV programming. Book review magazines make moneys off the books they review.

Legal interpretation, and why do we care anyway?

[Ruff_ilb]

"European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their content." Ok, what do they plan to do about it... I don't quite understand the legal implications of this, but it doesn't exactly seem like a standard case of copyright infringement to me. Even assuming that they could get anything on Google for this, that just means Google will drop them from everything in the future. Speaking as someone who gets a lot of their news off of the internet, I know that publishers demanding for their content to be hidden from search engines probably won't help them. If they just want it removed from the ads, I bet google can just say that the truely practicable way to have their content have nothing to do with the ads is to tell them that their content can have nothing to do with anything from the standard search engine to gmail to adsense. I think that the publishers who don't embrace the internet as a new medium for communication and find ways to work against it, not with it (for working against google isn't a very productive way to facilitate communication over the internet) are doomed to failure as we use the internet for more and more tasks. Heck, these companies measure things in terms of readers, you'd think they'd want as much coverage as they can get. The more I look like this it looks like a few whiny companies looking to make a few bucks.

I have come to a realization

[jandrese]

I now realize one basic truth of the World Wide Web, if you create something useful and popular, eventually someone is going to sue you for it. No matter what you do, the fact that you've found something useful is going to be threatening to someone and they're going to sue you (usually for millions of dollars) for it.

Every new web business should be prepared for a lawsuit at some point, no matter what they do. How many retarded suits have people brought against Google now? Even Slashdot gets lawsuit threats every now and then. Another thing you have to do is get a good idea of your rights and make sure you call people's bluff when they send harassment lawsuits at you (happens ALL of the time on the web).

What's the baseline rule?

[cfulmer]

There are two generic possible default rules of copyright: (1) you have to ask permission before copying (or other uses), and (2) The copyright owner has to tell you if he denies permission.

Rule (2) used to be the default rule, at least in the U.S. -- if you didn't mark your content with the (C) logo or otherwise indicate that it is under copyright, you lost your right to sue. (That's not quite how it worked, but close enough...)

Rule (1) is now the current rule -- everything is presumed to be under copyright and does not need to be marked in order to be protected. The change isn't huge, at least from a practical standpoint, because most people marked their work before the change (doing so wasn't costly) and anybody who wants to copy would go back to the publisher in either case. And,the penalty for not marking was pretty severe. There was also not much demand for widespread copying.

It seems to me that rule (2) makes the most sense for search engines and other content aggregators, and happens to be the one that's built into the 'net. After all, most websites want to be searched -- the entire reason you put things on the web is so people will come find it and look at your website. Search engines help that. In addition, it's hugely more efficient for websites to say whether they want to be indexed or not than for the search engines to ask permission from each website. In fact, having to ask permission would make search engines impossible. And, besides, robots.txt files have been around almost since the first webserver. It's easy.

In the US, I suspect that what a search engine does would have to be considered fair use. Probably the most important of the 4 "Fair Use" factors is "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyright material" -- providing a search capability, even if it also provides links to competitors, has to be a net positive good for a website. Two other of the 4 factors seem to lean in favor of fair use also: (1) "the purpose and character of the use" (basically, a search engine helps people find your content), and (2) "the nature of the copyrighted work" (a web page, which, by nature is intended to be searched.)

(IANAL yet.)

there is a very simple solution

[Pr0xY]

The solution to this problem is simple, if you don't want people to have access to your material, don't put it on the internet. Sure there will be a certain degree of piracy regarding these materials, but that would be far less widespread. Realistically, if you publish something on a website, well it's kinda just "out there" and if you expect people not to find it, or better yet, expect people not to still have it after you take it down, well you live in a fantasy world. IMHO everything on a legitimate website is fairgame for copying so long as the original authors are properly credited.

I suppose the issue really is with sites like the New York Times where they ask for a free membership to view their content and expect a certain amount of ad revenue from the viewers. And I am sure they will get annoyed when someone uses the NYT link generator (http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink) to access the site without logging in, or worse yet, mirrors the story on there own site (while crediting the original source of course). But I mean common, what did they expect to happen?

It's not that I don't think people have a right to control their content, but more that I think trying to enforce those rights is impossible. Get with the times people.

proxy

Re:Note to publishers:

[Pharmboy]

I'm not like you. I didn't read much news at all I started on the net in 95. (I'm 40) Now I still don't buy the paper (wife gets Sundays for ads) but I see a lot of ads with the online news that I use Google to find, then I go to the individual sites. They get to show me ads, get a few cents each time.

As for books, I have lots of ebooks, and I seldom read them. They are great for greping to find specific stuff, mainly tech manuals but little else for my purposes. But I am just like most serious readers, I prefer dead trees for real reading. My hardbook purchasing has increase, many fold, since the internet came out. So I don't buy the old "we can't make a living!" cry. Either a person loves to read or they don't, and the net introduces reading.

Here is what the internet *REALLY* does for book authors: If you are a big famous author, nothing much. If you are new, or write obscure works, it gives you higher exposure cheap, and more people will buy your book simply because more people have heard about it. Now, this MIGHT result in lower sales for famous writers, because they have some competition.

Similar (but admittedly different) to the RIAA. Its about CONTROL, not protection. Publishers want to protect their old way of doing things, and keeping the independents out is a great way. Regardless, I will still go shop at Borders, shop online with Amazon and BN. I will still shop Goodwill, Salvation Army and used book stores.

Google might get me to buy more books, but they damn sure won't get me to buy less.

Re:Oh no

[booch]

It's even worse than I thought!

I own a small store, and a lot of people come in to browse and don't buy anything.

The bus companies are making money off of people who come into my store!

Re:Profit Elsewhere [OT]

[Julian Morrison]

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.

That's an economic mistake and an important one, because it leads to bad policy. I'll explain how it's mistaken.

Value is the value of a thing to a person. Profit is the increase in value after a trade, versus before. So the seller profits by gaining money (wanted more) and losing product (wanted less). The buyer profits by losing money (wanted less) and gaining product (wanted more).

Wealth is the ability to achive personal goals. If you have more money, that's useful to you, so it's wealth. If you get something you need more, lose something you need less, then you have more wealth. Therefore profit produces personal wealth for both parties.

Some of the things you trade for, increase your efficiency. They let you achieve things you couldn't before. When other people's goals depend on your efficiency, your gain in wealth translates into a gain in societal wealth: everybody can achieve their goals a little easier. Therefore profit produces (on average) societal wealth for everyone.

Inflation and deflation reflect the usefulness of money. The limit of inflation is useless money. Infinite paper, nothing to buy, therefore infinite prices. The limit of deflation is getting everything for free. They relate to societal wealth. Wealth drops, money stays the same: inflation. Wealth rises, money stays the same: deflation. Therefore, profit is deflationary.

Given deflation, the same amount of money buys more. Therefore if anyone makes a profit, everyone makes a profit. This is the true virtue of the capitalist system, and it's the reason why Google's profits don't mean "someone else is getting less".

In related news...

[JeremyALogan]

In related news a local gas (petrol) station attendant was sued for providing directions. "All the time people would come by and ask me how to get to the local motel. Now I have to tell them that there is no local motel. How' was I to expect the motel would sue me for telling them how to get there?"

Read between the lines

[carpevita]

What really threatens publishers is not the fact that Google is making money off their content. What they are sweating is their declining ability to claim subscribers. In the periodical market, subscriber numbers determine the value of the publication. The more subscribers they can claim, the more they can charge for ads.

The publishers don't want you skimming an article here, article there. They want you on their home page. Like every other company where the word "content" flogged to death, they want their sites to be "portals", because calling yourself a "portal" is the online equivalent to claiming a subscriber base.

Google News breaks their model. But I don't think they're simply clinging blindly to archaic business models-- that's too easy. They all have websites, they all make money off of banner ads. What they are angling for is another piece of the action:

Yahoo Inc. has a similar service, though it uses human editors and pays some news sources, including AFP and The Associated Press, for rights.

Or, if Google won't pony up, a nice chunk of settlement will do nicely...

Pointing to robots.txt or their opt-out policy isn't going to spare Google any trouble, either. Just because I don't post a sign on my front door that says "Keep Out" doesn't give you permission to wander in and help yourself to a snack.

Re:Read between the lines

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Just because I don't post a sign on my front door that says "Keep Out" doesn't give you permission to wander in and help yourself to a snack.

No, but listening on port 80 constitutes permission for me to make requests of your server.

Re:I call bullshit

[martin-boundary]

Bullshit right back to you.

What do you call the Google cache? If you answer anything other than substantial screen scraping, then ding! play again.

The only leg Google have to stand on is the DMCA, which allows them to infringe copyright so long as they play common carrier. One of the requirements for immunity is that when asked, they promptly remove copyrighted material.

Now, Google literally steals the contents of millions of web pages, which most people have no problem with. However, a small number of news publishers and media sources (like those publishers and AFP) do pipe up and say no. Google has to comply, or likely lose in court. That's what they did when the scientologists piped up.

So far, so good. Trouble is, most news snippets and pictures on the net are syndicated, which means that all that stuff that gets archived by Google isn't owned by the small web operators who might not have a problem with seeing it in the cache, but it's owned by the media creators, who actually do object. So Google should remove it by the DMCA, but it's a technical nightmare. That's why they prefer to make a big fuss and go to court: if they followed the DMCA, there would be very little actual free news content left on the web, except blogs.

The other way out for Google is to actually legally license the use of the copyrighted material, exactly like all the other websites which sign up for syndication. But my guess is that they're afraid it would cost them an arm and a leg, so they'd rather fight in court.

The rest of your rant has nothing to do with copyright issues. If Google wants to offer critical opinions on consumer products, why not?

Re:Profit Elsewhere [OT]

[NixLuver]

Looks wonderful on paper, doesn't it?

The problem is that the philosophy you have expressed only inheres in a capitalism inhabited solely by those who act in rational self-interest. Rational means considering the ramifications of one's actions. Unfortunately, both producers and consumers in their various guises have proven to be terrible at this game. We live in a society where consumers are unreasonably swayed by marketing and the oft-championed 'excellence of product' that capitalism encourages is virtually unrecognizable. Frequently - and by frequently, I mean, say, 50% of the time or more, consumers purchase things, and feel that they have been taken advantage of. In many cases, they are right.

I am constantly amazed at the fact that those who deplore social anarchy the most are often the biggest champions of financial anarchy - Capitalism. And just like social anarchy, it only lasts as long as it takes for one player to accumulate enough 'stuff' to influence others, and then we have a de facto government, or a de facto monopoly.

Almost....

[abb3w]

I wonder how this and the coming e-paper revolution would play out. Google could really become poised to become the biggest book publisher in the world, when after browsing the book online, for a fee with 75% going to the author, it can be downloaded to your 8.5"x11" e-paper you use to read all your stuff (effectively your library.)

Almost.

You would still want to allow for a cut for editors, for authors willing to accept the help. Many slush pile authors REALLY need to keep their day jobs, and even tentacled horrors that crawl from the deep sea of slush are much more paletable after baking under the harsh glare of a disciplined editor's gimlet eye. I have no doubt that many authors would find themselves with a larger piece of a much smaller pie without editorial assistance.

Also, Print-on-demand grows ever more economical, approaching basic mass market publishing price. Imagine Google contracts with a POD publisher, and maybe also offers salaried positions to a couple talented-and-open-minded editors. Google Press makes the books on-line browsable. Editions are available as your suggested downloadable e-paper, but also paperback, trade (oversize) paperback, hardbound, or acid free leather. More costly materials, of course, mean higher cover (?) price, with a smaller percentage of sale price (but larger absolute amount) going to the author.

Of course, editorial talent is almost as hard to find as authorial talent. Still, it has possibilities....

teeny-boppers on drugs

[patiodragon]

"First: the notion that there is "only so much money." It is true that there is are only so many nominal dollars/yen/etc. However, you can make money right in your own home! Just get a piece of paper and write "IOU $5" and give it to a friend. Congratulations. You have just increased the total amount of money in the world by $5."

How in the world is this "insightful"? Can I turn off these moronic rating things? This is a just plain dumb example. When you go and repay your friend, you have to get the $5 bill from somewhere. You get a job, ask your mom, whatever... but you have NOT increased the money supply at all --just moved it around a bit. The government inflates the money supply to its liking pretty much how they want.

OTOH, now that there is nothing of any real value backing up the money the government prints (first gold, then silver, now "in God we trust") it IS a total scam.

Re:Copynorms

[cyberformer]

AFP and other agencies could just change the terms of their licensing so that their customers can't post to a server that's indexed by Google News. If they already have, then the online publishers are breaking their contracts (and probably copyright law as well).

Re:Profit Elsewhere [OT]

[JesseMcDonald]

The problem with this objection, of course, is that *no* economic system works very well unless its participants are acting in accordance was some approximation of rational self-interest. There are some, such as socialism, which can do without self-interest on the part of the majority, in exchange for placing control over the economy in the hands of a few individuals with no real responsibilities toward their subjects. How, exactly, is such a system in any way an improvement over capitalism?

All forms of democracy require self-interest on the part of the population to prevent a fall into socialism or dictatorship. In fact, there exists no form of government which does *not* have this condition. No government, no matter how well intentioned, can long withstand apathy from its citizenship without straying from its original ideals. Economic systems are subject to the same rule, as all forms of economics, other than capitalism/free-market systems, place control over the economy in the hands of the goverment.