Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News

Posted by Zonk on from the get-off-of-our-lawn dept.

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.'"

3 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fair Use by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  2. Re:Not very clever of them. by amazon10x · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. What would this mean for Slashdot? by Disposable+Rob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "'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.