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.'"

Comments

Huh?

[saikatguha266]

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?

Re:I'll remember this statement.

[welcher]

They pay for the Reuters or AP wire - that's how wire services make their money

Re:Copyright violation?

[interiot]

The fair use doctrine has been described as a murky concept in which it is often difficult to separate the lawful from the unlawful.

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.

Re:Copyright violation?

[Otter]

Last I checked, citing a few lines from a newspaper article had a term: 'fair use'.

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.

Re:Why do I get the feeling...

[sheddd]

I imagine you're mostly correct (Big papers hate google, little ones love them)...
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
#
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pages/college/
Disallow: /college/
Disallow: /library/
Disallow: /learning/
Disallow: /aponline/
Disallow: /reuters/
Disallow: /cnet/
Disallow: /partners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /indexes/
Disallow: /thestreet/
Disallow: /nytimes-partners/
Disallow: /financialtimes/
Allow: /pages/
Allow: /2003/
Allow: /2004/
Allow: /2005/
Allow: /top/
Allow: /ref/
Allow: /services/xml/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow: