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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.'"
I'd call it fair use, advertising for the news sources even, but of course I'm probably biased because Google News is just so damn convienent.
Honestly, Just cause google called it beta before and now it doesnt did not change anything legally. They were still open for legal attack just as much then as now (which is yet to be determined) In all likelyhood they have nothing to worry about since they are simply aggregating data and well that is a use under copyright. Newspapers, quite bitching,. most people wouldnt even read your particular site if it werent for google News.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
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.
My blog
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?
BREAKING HEADLINE: Newspapers Still Doing Dumb Shit, Continue To Put Selves Out Of Business
you mean Google is doing what every media outlet has done?
Built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content. When was the last time the news reporter payed you after publishing an article reporting your car accident, or that you were being sued.
...that Google's response will be, "If you don't want to be listed, you don't have to be listed. Bye."
It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot.
From TFA:"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."
Some companies PAY for a little link to their site to appear when there is a relevant Google search. These newspapers get indexed, and linked to, from a high traffic site, for FREE, and they are complaining. Instead of throwing lawyers at the problem, they should engage their brains for a moment and figure out which option is better for their business.
I think the problem with most newspapers is that by and large, they are news aggregators, not news reporters. Most local newspapers have a staff of reporters who go out and report local news--but for the bulk of their content they rely upon content that is not written in-house. (Wire services such as Reuters, AP and UPI, along with syndicated columns, form the bulk of most newspapers today--which means that many of the national articles in the Fresno Bee, say, are the same articles that appear in the Washington Post.)
So while it's sort of simplistic to say that this is all fair use, the reality is that Google News, by making a better mouse trap (dynamic news aggregation) is--probably without even realizing it--competing head to head with local newspapers.
No, didn't you know? They have a bot which goes onto password protected new sites, bute forces the password, scrapes all the new articles and media, copies it to their Google clusters, reformats the information into pages which decree that the stories have been investigated, reported, and brought to you by Google.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
They pay for the Reuters or AP wire - that's how wire services make their money
That by "newspapers" we're talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, and not much else? It seems that, more often than not, the first link for a particualr news story is a smaller newspaper that doesn't exactly have a nationwide readership, giving their sites (and banner ads) far more traffic than they'd have without news aggregators. The only papers I could see complaining are the ones that already have their own national and/or global distribution channels.
Much as I like Google, I've stopped reading the Google News much at all. First of all articles get the
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 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...
Please help metamoderate.
It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot."
I suspect the larger news sources would rather have the practice halted completely. This would force people to go to a major news site (them) rather than google which sometimes leads people to lesser news sites. Slashdot has been linked from a Google headline more than once. Big news sites don't want people to be aware of any alternatives.
Smaller news sources probably like the publicity Google provides them. Larger news sources probably don't like the publicity Google provides those smaller competitors.
They don't want to opt out, they want it all to just go away.
Thanks to Google News, I've made hundreds of visits to news organizations' web sites that I wouldn't otherwise have made. And on all of those visits, I've viewed ads for which the news organizations earned money.
Silly journalists...
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Someone please explain to me how this is any different than Google Search indexing these exact same articles and making the first few lines available through their search engine? Or Google images making these exact same images available from Google's servers?
Either way, Google is still directing web traffic to their sites. There are a lot of news articles on various sites I would have never read if it weren't for Google news. I don't have time to track thousands of different online news outlets, so Google does it for me. I have even *gasp* clicked on ads after being redirected to the news vendors website. Even more shocking, there has been a few (5 actually) news outlets who's RSS feeds I have subscribed to after reading a few articles of theirs linked to from Google News.
Oh well, there are no laws against stupidity. This is almost as dumb as book publishers getting in a panic over Google Book Search, which is free advertising as far as I'm concerned. Or do they fear people will be satisfied with the page shown on Google Book Search and not buy the full book? Generally, when I want to read a book, I want to read the full book. The same thing with the news. I don't read the Google News homepage and not go to the full source.
"'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.
If you don't like being indexed, put a frigging robots.txt file on your site and watch how much you'll be saving in bandwidth costs afterwards as your traffic plummets.
The newspapers not only need to lose on this one -- they need to lose big!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"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.
Vote for Pedro
On the other hand, publishers are not code jockeys (and robots.txt was not in the original spec).
Oh, please, how naive can you be? The NYT web site was created by highly paid, experienced web designers and developers. Of course, they know about robots.txt, and any court would expect a company of that wealth and publishing experience to hire people that know about it.
And even if the NYT employees were so incompetent that they don't know, Google tells them about it. Google even gives you a means for removing your site immediately.