Slashdot Mirror
Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News
Hitokiri writes "Now that Google News is out of beta the newspaper publishers are starting to take notice. It's important to note that no legal action has taken place yet, but still, there seems to be a battle on the horizon." From the article: "'They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,' Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. 'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"
I thought the courts did decide: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php
"A district court in Nevada has ruled that the Google Cache is a fair use."
Or does every industry want to file a separate suit asking the court to decide whether caching that industry's content is fair or not?
They pay for the Reuters or AP wire - that's how wire services make their money
Also, most fair-use cases fall under comment-and-criticism... eg. it's okay to use one image of Homer Simpson on the Homer Simpson Wikipedia page, because that's one way to identify Homer while commenting about him.
Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.
It depends on the use. Quoting a few lines of a newspaper article in the middle of your own text is clearly protected. Stitching together multiple headlines, photos and first paragraphs to make a freestanding "newspaper" is not, although I don't think Google News rises to that level. At any rate, I'm sure they can afford plenty of attorneys.
The issue is whether the excerpted part loses the overall impact of the whole. The closest ruling that comes to mind is that porn thumbnails were ruled to be sufficiently arousing in their own right that copying them is infringement, not fair use.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
The relevant statute -- United States Copyright law of 1976 [17 USC 107]:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A [17 USC sects 106, 106A] the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
There is a real question of law here, but I consider that there is a case against Google. Indexing does not fall into any of the protected classes of use, has obvious commercial value and a clear, negative effect upon the value of the copyrighted work.
illegitimii non ingravare
In civilized countries the article is clearly marked as comming from a "news" agency lime AP or Reuters. No doubt about it.
There is a real question of law here, but I consider that there is a case against Google. Indexing does not fall into any of the protected classes of use, has obvious commercial value and a clear, negative effect upon the value of the copyrighted work.
The courts have already ruled that Google cache qualifies under this, and have ruled a system nearly identical to Google images is fair use. Providing a thumbnail and a few sentences so that people can find something is almost certainly fair use in keeping with existing precedent. That is why no one has bothered to sue them over it.
Out of curiosity I googled a bit and the Lobbyist group is funded by The newspaper assn of america which has a bunch of big and small members, one of which is the New York Times... interesting robots.txt on their site:
# robots.txt, www.nytimes.com 3/24/2005 /pages/college/ /college/ /library/ /learning/ /aponline/ /reuters/ /cnet/ /partners/ /archives/ /indexes/ /thestreet/ /nytimes-partners/ /financialtimes/ /pages/ /2003/ /2004/ /2005/ /top/ /ref/ /services/xml/
#
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
I don't agree with the assessment of Google Earth. There is alot of "non-tourist" regions in higher res photos than just the tourist spots. For example, rural central Oregon isn't exactly a tourist region, yet it's higher res than say Baghdad Iraq.
I'll do a quick, non-tourist tour for crap res or higher res.
Central Oregon - Higher Res
Mountain Home AFB Idaho - Higher Res
North Central Navada - A mix
Buffalo Wyoming - Higher Res
ANWR - medium res
Eagle Butte SD - Low, low res
Pyongyang DPRK - Higher res
Rangoon Burma - medium res
Desert south of Riyadh - higher res
So really, for a free application, it does a good job.
Isn't that already handled by the /robots.txt file?
Google supposedly honers the Disallow statement.
Are things different when they go after a newspaper web site?
Slashdot has less exposure than Google news due to the fact they are not using a photo with the news article. Since bots can easily be restricted through the robots.txt standard I do not see this issue going anywhere.
Just thought I'd add that what that means is that they are explicitly allowing Mediapartners-Google* access to all files, not disallowing. If they wanted to disallow google, they would need the line Disallow: /
sig under construction...
Almost.
Google provides me a service (location of interesting stories) but they don't provide the actual stories. Guess what, idiot lobbyists? If you don't want your site to show up in Google News, you can accomplish this with a robots.txt file. Remedy is trivial -- your issue is a thinly disguised protection racket.
But you were probably being sarcastic anyway.
They don't have to. The content is free. It's the expression that's copyrighted.
What he means, of course, is aggregators aren't paying for the articles, the news, the writing, the copy, the expression.
Easy: go to fair.org
1) A link to the index page of an media watch dog is not putting up some numbers. Is this part of your scientifically rigourous approach to facts? I'm familiar with the FAIR website -- just where does it give numbers that show the proportion of journalists that fabricate stories, let alone indicate that it's "lots" of them? In fact, FAIR clearly doesn't believe that journalists "fabricat[e], or close to it" articles, or that the journalistic profession is endemically corrupt, or they wouldn't (from their "About Us" page) "defend working journalists [and work] with both activists and journalists. We maintain a regular dialogue with reporters at news outlets across the country, providing constructive critiques when called for and applauding exceptional, hard-hitting journalism." And many current and former subscribers to FAIR (including myself) are journalists, and FAIR is regularly quoted by journalists in both the mainstream and alternative press.
2) Pointing to scientfic literature is a non sequitor. Scientific papers, to have any value at all, confine themseleves to science. As the recent court case against intelligent design showed, attempting to broaden science to cover the full spectrum of human experience and thought is antithetical to what science is. Trying to compare scientific literaure with journalism is apples to oranges. Journalists, even when striving to be as accurate, well-researched and fair as humanely possible, don't write articles like scientific papers because it would be wholly inappropriate. Journalism has different objectives, with different audience demands. Scientific reportage of facts is designed to allow other scientists to recreate those the process by which those facts were derived. Journalists don't do that -- for example, because Woodruff and Bernstein didn't tell every reader of the Washington Post exactly how they too could reproduce their reporting, should readers have rejected the evidence of corruption within the Nixon administration?
3) By the way, if you're looking for universal factual purity in scientific comunity, you're on a fools errand: scientists are heavily incentivized to "make a name for themselves" too, with direct inducements in the form of academic and institutional positions and grant monies. Here's a hard statistic: The Journal of Cell Biology recently reported that some 25% of manuscripts submitted to it have had images that were manipulated in some way that violates their guidelines. This isn't to attack cell biology as a crock, just to let you know that science isn't some totem that you can fetishize into a gold standard by which to weigh journalism.
4) "I'm not talking about the deliberate deceptions that a number of journalists have been caught at, I'm talking about journalism itself" Ah, just as predicted, weasling. You originally wrote; "that's what a lot of [journalists] do. The bad part is that a lot of the effort that goes into their stories is fabrication or close to it.". A fabrication is a deliberate deception. Non-deliberate deception is usually covered under the terms 'bias' or 'error'-- the FAIR website can tell you more about this. And you weren't talking about journalism, you were talking about journalists, so you were talking about deliberate deceptions commited by a (still unspecified) number of individuals. You were also dismissing a commenter's opinion on the basis that they hadn't met any journalists. And again, if meeting journalists is your criteria for the worth of an opinion, just how many have you met?
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who