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.

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.

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...

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.

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: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?