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

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.