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

Copyright violation?

[morgan_greywolf]

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

Why wait this long? Google News has been running for YEARS, albeit with the 'beta' moniker.

Re:Copyright violation?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

Check out Kelly V. Arribisoft. Basically it is ok to copy an entire copyrighted work, for the purpose of republishing an excerpt of that work, in an automated fashion, even when providing those excerpts coupled with advertising is done in order to make a profit. Basically, this rules Google images+advertisements is legal.

An excerpt that is a thumbnail and a chunk of text, that is a piece of a larger worker is not qualitatively any different and it is unlikely this sort of precedent (including the the handful of other cases that have all reached this same precedent) is going to overturned. In fact every district court in the US, sans one has filed a supporting brief. (I might mention that was the one where those random publishing houses filed against Google books.) Most lawyers and certainly IP lawyers are very aware that Google will almost certainly win a challenge against them, which is partly why no one with a clue files suits against them on these grounds anymore.

Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing something or doesn't Google News only link to new sites that have free content anyway?

Re:Am I missing something?

[Tango42]

What ads? I can usually tell when Adblock has removed something, and it doesn't remove text ads anyway, and that's what google mainly uses, and I see no adds on Google News.

Re:Fair Use

[tomhudson]

I'd tell the newspapers to be careful of what they ask for - they might just end up getting it:

'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.'"

Don't be surprised if at least quoting the first few lines ends up being fair use. Besides, how do they expect their own online content to be seen if it isn't indexed - google could charge them instead of doing it for free. Its not like I'm going to go and find all these news items on my own.

Re:What does Beta have to do with anything

[tomhudson]

Because google traditionally takes drops beta when its time to start making REAL money off of it ... expect to see some changes in Google News in the future. Maybe newspapers will have to PAY to be on Google News ...

Re:I predict...

[OrangeDoor]

Precisely, they could opt out by by saying nobody is allowed to quote their articles. I doubt any paper would choose to opt out of it. This is just a struggling entity flailing around for something to hold onto. It's just them fearing the new technology and therefore fighting against it... (This is my first post on slashdot from a linux machine, it feels like a significant step for me).

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[urbaneassault]

I'm a huge supporter of Google News, but keep in mind that newspapers pay top dollar to syndicate UPI, AP, and Reuters - costs that Google doesn't incur. But, considering the aggregation side of what Google does, I think it's completely within fair use. If they started charging to view the aggregate feeds, or hosted the full text of the articles without permission, that would be a much different story.

Google News:Real News :: Google Earth:GIS

[stanwirth]

Much as I like Google, I've stopped reading the Google News much at all. First of all articles get the /. effect, and it's much the same coverage as you see in the NYT and BBC anyway. Worse, because it has a "popularity" filter on it. If I were in a field that relied on any more accurate coverage of world events, I'd have to go to primary sources anyway.

I tried Google Earth the other day too, and it has the same kind of "filter" -- eye candy for Africa, but if you have to look at a non-tourist spot, you're pretty much SOL. Since I'm in a field that does rely on more accurate GIS, I use real GIS software and data.

let me finish your sentence for you, Mr. Rahnema

[SuperBanana]

"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article"

Let me finish that sentence for you, Mr. Rahnema:

"...and using it to send viewers to Association member's webpages, bringing us new readers, and generating ad revenue we ordinarily wouldn't have. Sadly, it means we all have to compete against each other, whereas before, we enjoyed regional favoritism. We're absolutely terrified that someone in Boston might find better coverage of a story on the BBC's website, or Washington Post. Or that they can find as much as they want about Elephants, instead of having to read an entire paper, or poke around our site. And they won't pay for the privledge of searching our archives. Especially since much of the time, all we do is parrot an AP/Reuters wire story, word for word....we're terribly concerned about all this."

Hey, if they don't like it- they can always redirect any hit with a referral from news.google.com to "Sorry, we don't support google news." There's also nothing stopping them from blocking all the googlebot crawlers- either by IP range, or browser ID.

Except that then they'd loose a lot of viewers, and become a black hole to the world's most popular search engine. So instead, they run to the legislature...

Pot, kettle, black.

[AnotherBlackHat]

They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,

Last I checked, newspapers don't pay for the quotes they publish either.

Isn't news supposed to be the reporting of facts, not a creative work?

-- Should you believe authority without question?

Re:Not very clever of them.

[amazon10x]

I think the reason they are so upset with this is because it makes the competitors more available.

Let's assume that Bob enjoys reading news on the internet. However, Bob does not know of these things referred to as "portals". Rather than pulling up 10 different windows (using internet explorer (Bob is an idiot, BTW) which makes it worse) for NYTimes, Washington Post, MSN, Yahoo, his local paper, and some others, Bob takes the lazy way out and uses only the NYTimes site because he doesn't like swapping windows.

Now Bob's friend comes along and tells Bob to go to news.google.com to get his news. Bob acquiesces and reads Google News from here on. Now Bob gets to see hundreds of different news sources rather than just the NYTimes. This is bad for the NYTimes so they sue Google.

I am not saying I agree with them suing, I believe it is fair use. However, I do see why they're suing.

What would this mean for Slashdot?

[Disposable Rob]

"'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.'"

Except for the occasional unique content like interviews, doesnt this describe Slashdot? Along with Fark, Digg and countless blogs whose entire sites who report what others are reporting, except they use people instead of Google's crawlers.

Re:Fair Use

[Traiklin]

yes because the Internet doesn't require tons of servers, power, cables or wires to be of any use to anyone right?

Let's see, kill some trees to make papers or kill some trees to make room for a new powerplant that is either coal, gas or nuclear based.

robots.txt

[cnb]

Why aren't they simply blocking google using robots.txt if they don't want to be listed?

you're very confused

[geekee]

"Quiet down and pay for the rights to see the same AP or Reuters article on 200 different web sites. It's the Capitalist way."

Since when have you ever paid for an AP or Reuters news story online. The news sites posting them pay for them, and use advertising to subsidize. Google doesn't pay for linking to them and uses advertising to subsidize their non-payments.

Re:you're very confused

[Frostalicious]

Google doesn't pay for linking to them and uses advertising to subsidize their non-payments.

Most people WANT Google to link to them, and even pay Google for the privilege. Why is this different?

Re:you're very confused

[Magic5Ball]

Most people WANT Google to link to them, and even pay Google for the privilege. Why is this different?

Many news web sites are not treated as profit centers, but as expenses. I know of a number of smaller papers (circulation < 250,000) that see 90 per cent of web traffic come from Google, which is next to useless for their readership numbers and local advertising. The lucky ones use Google ads to pay for the bandwidth used by random Google visitors, the others are SOL.

<bias>As someone who runs the IT for a weekly community paper in addition to my day job, I'm currently trying various methods of reducing the Google effect to less than its current (and steadily increasing by 5-10% per month) 4.5 Mb/s of bandwidth usage for hits from Google search results. It's not really a cost center for us, but I would like to use the bandwidth for faster e-mail attachment downloads and such...

they could squash them ...

[zogger]

...like a bug, easy.

Scenario 1: Googlenews could just drop a small to them sum and carry AP, UPI, AFP, etc stories under their own brand name, and not even bother with other papers. They could then offer the now redundant newspapers to pay them to be indexed.

Scenario 2, if for some reason number 1 wouldn't work: Google could put out the internet call for independent reporters en masse around the world, offer a small fee per word/pic/video for accepted and published product, and probably squash the news syndicators. They could have 10,000 reporters (whatever, pick a big number that would work) within a week if they wanted to, every language, every location, every topic. Maybe even squash or at least scare the big broadcast networks for that matter. Most of them use freelancers for a boatload of their product anyway, so quite a few might be lured into working for Google. They could turn this whole argument around, and it would be the local newspapers and broadcasters paying Google serious folding money for content and indexing services, instead of complaining about them "stealing their stuff", which is a crock anyway.

The only dead tree paper I get anymore is the freebie that comes in the mailbox, and that gets used for woodstove fire starter kindling, it's still good for that. I honestly don't care about local high school sports scores. All that is left with local papers of any value is a smidgen of local politics and the classified ads, and there the ads are being taken over by the freebie "ads only" papers you see. The big city papers are even worse, their news is exactly the same as everyone else's, so there's little need for the dead trees version unless you just like to rattle newspaper around at the breakfast table, and also hence why I never "register" to go to any of their website versions, it's like, why do you need to do that when there's 500 other sites with the same exact information and don't require registration? You want my eyeballs to view your site and ads, don't make me register for that privelege, because I won't.

The so called "main stream news" needs a big shakeup anyway, IMO, they need to get scared and go back to their roots a little more, and rediscover real journalism and get rid of being parrots of a few official party lines.

I'm a serious old time news junky, I taught myself to read by reading the newspaper headlines compared to the TV news headlines before I went to kindergarten, and the newspapers have lost *me* as a customer because it just gradually turned into corporate shilling crap and government propoganda mixed in with bread and cicuses hollyweird news and sports gods "scores". And they wonder why their product is being abandoned......

Google News: Not as important as you think

[Conright]

I love it how so many of you think not being listed on Google News is the end of a newspaper's career. You do not realize that Google News is not even in the top 10 for most popular news site on the internet.

Here is a quote from a Marketwatch article today: "Yahoo! News is No. 1, with 24.6 million unique visitors in December, up 15% from a year ago, followed by AOL at No. 4, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Google News stands at No.13 with 7.8 million unique visitors..."

I have a dog in this fight.

[aliscool]

My site, linked below on my sig if you care to look is 90% content driven RSS and RDF feeds, of news and blogs, which are provided by the News site or blog site for exactly this type of aggregation via a feed.
Although I get content for my viewers, it is actually also a service for the news or blog site I aggregate. Unless they fully feed the article my readers get teasers which link the the parent site for the full article. I do have moderation and comments related to the news article in question... but the teaser drive folks to the parent site.
What they get for providing me a steady content stream is free linkage and traffic from my site. I am more than happy to provide it.... but its a I scratch your back you scratch mine arrangement.
Google does the same thing on a MUCH larger scale. But the principles apply.

Re:nonsense

[BasilBrush]

Absolutely. This makes a complete nonsense out of the newspapers claims. Trouble is, what the newspapers want is not for their site to be removed from the index, but for Google News to be shut down, as they see it as a competition as a news portal. If they only withdraw from being indexed themselves, they'll only succeed in reducing traffic to their site, whilst Google News is every bit as much as a news portal competitor as before.

Re:I predict...

[houghi]

So spammers must have an opt-in, yet Google must have an opt-out?

Re:I'll remember this statement.

[Keith McClary]

they bought the right to copy it so they are not hypocrites. Google didn't bought that right.

Google could easily afford to buy "wire service" feeds. Then Google wouldn't need to link to all those "newspaper" sites - they could could link to the full article on a Google site with ads.